Six hours had passed since Aeneas left.
That night in her trailer, Angela imagined that she had said yes. That she had followed Aeneas to sea, that she was now high up on a deck, looking back at Punta Verde as penguins porpoised around her. The researchers would have their theories for why she left suddenly. People who did not know her would say she’d been kidnapped. People who did would say she was in love. But she was neither. Aeneas had been right. She was tired. Tired of watching trawlers pass at night, their multitude of nets and longlines and vacuum hoses sucking the life from the ocean with GPS-enabled precision, with her penguins as bycatch. Tired of days spent holding onto the ends of ropes, walking in circles. Tired of counting survivors.
In the morning, she woke earlier than usual. She went to Aeneas’ empty camp, broke down the tent, packed up the trash and wine bottles. Later she asked Doug to help her carry the bags back to the station. He seemed happy to be in her good graces again. That evening, he offered to show her Neptune, but she declined.
The next day, Shelly returned, and they all settled back into their old routines. The chicks were fledging. The breeding season would be over in a few weeks, and the penguins would waddle their starved bodies back to sea to drink deeply, to follow the fish, to elude the predators that waited just below the water line.
Tourist buses gridlocked the parking lot and dirt road, a convoy of idling engines and exhaust. Angela skipped dinner that evening, knowing that Shelly would be there, that by then she’d know about everything that had happened while she was away. Angela knew she had to apologize, but she didn’t have the strength for it yet. She retired to her trailer alone.
Later that night, a noise woke her, and she rushed outside, hoping it was him. Instead she found a pair of dueling male penguins. As she watched them, she cursed Aeneas for ruining her home. For half her life, this had been the only land that mattered, the only place she truly called home. Now the entire landscape felt barren and lonely.
The next morning, a penguin was run over as it tried to scurry between two buses. Angela pleaded again with the guardafauna to shut down the road and make the tourists walk the last half-mile uphill to the trail. He said he would ask the provincial administrator when the man arrived in two months. But that was too late, she tried to tell him; by then, a dozen more penguins could get hit.
No one seemed to understand that the penguins had a tight schedule to adhere to and could not wait patiently for buses to pass. That penguins weren’t comfortable walking through throngs of people to get to the water, to their food source. That these human obstacles could mean life or death for their chicks. Once, Angela remembered, a penguin had died of heat stroke waiting for tourists to let it pass. He’d died right there in front of them, surrounded by flashing cameras. For the birds, the tourist trail was a gantlet, one that grew more dangerous every year.
The tourists are loving them to death, Shelly once said. But Angela didn’t detect much in the way of love. Tourists didn’t come to sit and observe. They didn’t come to learn and appreciate. They came to turn their backs to the penguins, to pose for photographs, to prove that they’d been here. The penguins were nothing but a backdrop to them.
Angela wandered off toward the water, aimless. She stared at the ocean until the sunlight faded, watching penguins fall into the crashing waves, drink deeply, shake the land from their feathers, and finally disappear below. It was so much easier, she realized, to be the one who left than the one left behind.
Angela walked to Diesel’s nest, now empty. She got on her knees and lifted out the bodies of the chicks. She buried them behind her trailer.