Changing Spots – by Sharon Kent
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY | AUSTRALIAN NATURE WRITING
Hydrurga leptonyx; image by Nick Russill
“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?
Then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.”
Jeremiah 13:23
I find the scats on the beach, lying by a faint depression in the sand. With careful gloved hands I pick them up. They are strange – grey-brown with a gritty texture, smelling nothing like the dog faeces they are supposed to resemble. I label a plastic bag with neat letters –16 January 2017. The Neck, Bruny Island, Tasmania – then drop the scats into the bag and seal it up. Later, a researcher will examine the specimen and extract samples for DNA analysis – a small piece in a giant puzzle. Through the plastic, I can see feathers. They are black and white. I wonder if any of them belong to the little penguins from the colony behind the dunes. I straighten up and walk back to the boardwalk. Later tonight I will talk to visitors about the little penguins, who are out in southern oceanic waters, diving up to 70 metres deep for krill and small fish. Eudyptula minor – good little diver. When the sun goes down, we will wait in the hide, eyes straining for a glimpse of taut white bellies and hurried waddling up the beach to the safety of burrows.
That night, I do not think about little penguins. I think about the scat, in our freezer, next to the tub of ice-cream. I know you, I think. Who you are and where you’ve come from.
*
A light pattering of snow is drifting down on our shoulders. It nestles in our hair so lightly, I don’t even notice it. We stand on a rock, staring at the sea. Today it is grey and the sky is leaden, with a horizon leaning so far back that both sea and sky merge at the vanishing point. To the south, in the far distance, are the formidable icy cliffs of the Peterson and Vanderford glaciers. Behind us, across the narrow channel to the north-west, lies Casey Station, where only yesterday we filled our backpacks with food and safety equipment, then traversed the snow, sea ice and rock track to Shirley Island. At our backs, only a short walk away, is a red apple hut, our home and office when we are working here in the Adelie penguin colony. Closer yet is the gun-metal grey of Newcomb Bay, where a leopard seal, only metres in front of us, is tearing apart an Adelie penguin.
My workmate whispers. I whisper back. We stand there, still and quiet in our bright polar clothing, dressed for the treacherous Antarctic weather that can bluster up from nowhere. Today it is calm. There is no need for binoculars or a hide; still, we watch tentatively, as if we shouldn’t be privy to something so raw and intimate, as if we are gatecrashing. The host seems oblivious to our presence.
“There is no need for binoculars or a hide; still, we watch tentatively, as if we shouldn’t be privy to something so raw and intimate, as if we are gatecrashing. The host seems oblivious to our presence.”
The leopard seal swims leisurely around its catch. There is nothing frantic; the seal is patient and deliberate, occasionally prodding the penguin, then diving out of sight. I look across to the penguins gathered on the rocky slope. There is no chatter now, no preening of feathers or shuffling towards the shore. We all watch, silent as stones. The seal emerges and grabs the penguin, flicks it in the air, then rolls, submerges, rises to it again, flaying the penguin back and forth, slapping it against the sea. It is nature and art at once – a vermillion blur of flesh flung through all that grey of sea and sky and seal, like a painter spraying bold colour across a monochrome canvas. I am mesmerised. Then the final act – the long reptilian head with the wide smiling mouth gapes open, tosses back and swallows, a chunk at a time. Unable to move or look away, I stay until the end, until the seal is done, until the watching penguins, in uncharacteristic silence, have retreated back up the rock face to their colony. I too retreat, sombre as the day.
*
My first encounter with a leopard seal was on a page. Mooching about the red shed at Casey on a day off, I tucked myself up in the library nook. There weren’t many books to choose from, but one looked interesting: a logbook from the early years of Casey Station. Deciphering the longhand scrawl was tedious, but one entry caught my eye. The story began innocuously enough; a day off, a plan to cross the sea ice to a nearby island. I could easily imagine it – the sea ice brittle white and stretching from shore to shore, with milky blue pools like tiny mountain tarns scattered over the surface. In the distance, a cobalt sea, clear to the horizon. The men spread out, gingerly testing their weight, mindful of sudden breakouts. Perhaps the field leader checking for ice thickness with a ski pole, his companions likewise concentrating, tentatively prodding. The fellow at the back lost in thoughts of home. It must have come as such a shock, so unexpected – like a car crash, where you are humming along on autopilot and then suddenly you are flung to the roof upside down, your ears filled with the crash, the splintering roar of it. The ice behind him has erupted into a flurry of snow and ice shards, as a leopard seal punches through and lunges out for him. I shake my head with wonder. Imagine that, I’m thinking. It is said that Shackleton once stood a man on the edge of the ice and as a leopard seal lunged out of the water to attack, he shot it for dog meat.
*
It is January and Hobart is hot. I am in Alonnah, South Bruny Island, on a narrow strip of sand that hugs the coast of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. Across the road behind me is the Hotel Bruny, the southernmost hotel in Australia. I walk down to see the seal I have heard about and my heart flips to see that it’s a leopard seal – a juvenile, a vagrant, that at this time of year would usually be hunting in the pack ice. The seal is hauled up on the beach like a weathered dinghy with a patina of peels and scrapes. Researchers say that, on average, five leopard seals find their way to Tasmania’s beaches every year. Even so, it is beyond strange to see one here.
“Researchers say that, on average, five leopard seals find their way to Tasmania’s beaches every year. Even so, it is beyond strange to see one here.”
People walk past holding ice-creams. Some get too close. The seal rises up, opens its jaws wide in a threat display, then flops listlessly back to the sand. There are squeals of delight. I stand there, a sentry on the beach, as much for the seal as the people. Here, I am the apex predator and the seal is out of place. Its pelt looks dusty, like a museum specimen that has been in mothballs too long. Where it lies, the sand is warm and dry. I sit and watch for ages, both of us baking in the sun. I want it to go back to Antarctica and get that wet, sleek look. I stretch my legs out and struggle to my feet. The northerly wind is picking up and I want a drink. Something with ice in it.
*
There are moments in Antarctica – this coldest and windiest place on the planet, a land of blizzards and icebergs – when it feels like the continent itself holds its breath. A sunny day of six degrees, blue sky, the air so clear that if forever was a place, you would see it flashing on the horizon, every glittering face of it.
“There are moments in Antarctica – this coldest and windiest place on the planet, a land of blizzards and icebergs – when it feels like the continent itself holds its breath. A sunny day of six degrees, blue sky, the air so clear that if forever was a place, you would see it flashing on the horizon, every glittering face of it.”
We stand there, Antarctica and I, shoulder to shoulder, caught in that moment, the resting place between breaths, which the yogis revere as the deepest point of stillness and peace. All movement is suspended. There is only the moment – a deep, profound silence and a vista so unreal it seems a hallucination. Ice cliffs are mirrored in the calm and growler icebergs float to the horizon. Offshore, there’s a big blue iceberg with a solitary Adelie penguin perched on top.
While I am thinking of nothing, while I am in that meditative space, I hear another breath out around the ice floes. It’s an exhalation, forceful and loud, breaking the silence like a gunshot. I search the sea – a pilot whale? An orca? It is thrilling, this wait. My eyes feel so sharp they could cut the air. Finally I see it: a head held aloft, the lower jaw reflected in the water – such a strange image that it takes me a moment to recognise what I’m seeing. The seal swims with barely a ripple, straight towards me – standing there in the snow, embedded in ice and rocks like a tall, red pole.
As I watch the seal approach, I begin to feel nervous. It is a leopard seal, its jaws closed in the trademark thin-lipped smile. The seal swims with its neck lifted above the mirror-calm surface. Such stillness. Such perfection. To turn and retrace my steps, my Sorel boots scratching rock and ice, would be too loud and somehow rude, like scraping out a chair to leave a church service early. So I stand there, perched on a rock like an anxious penguin, so close to the sea’s surface that I could dip the toe of my boot into the water.
“To turn and retrace my steps, my Sorel boots scratching rock and ice, would be too loud and somehow rude, like scraping out a chair to leave a church service early. So I stand there, perched on a rock like an anxious penguin, so close to the sea’s surface that I could dip the toe of my boot into the water.”
The seal does not submerge or dive below. It swims purposefully towards me, languorous and unhurried. All I can see is its head. Underneath is a body that could be up to three and a half metres long, weighing over 500 kilograms. There is hardly a ripple. The seal reaches the rock where I am standing and lolls at my feet like a great dog, every now and then raising its chest to get a better look. I can see every spot and marking; up close, this seal with its perfect coat and sleek, well-fed torso is a thing of beauty. I am surprised that its pelt is not uniform grey, that there are other colours I’d never imagined would be there – shades of silver, white and even brown, with blue-black spots pockmarked into its coat like a criminal’s tattoo. I am so close.
The water swirls around the seal’s torso, gin-clear, then fizzing and broiling aquamarine as it twists and rolls – those powerful exhalations now right at my feet. We are eye to eye. For how long, I don’t know.
Some years later, I learn that of all places for a leopard seal to attack humans, the most likely is at the ice edge.
*
It is our last day in the field, and we are packing up our equipment and carrying it to the Zodiac. My companions are in a hurry and we load the boat quickly. It is almost April and the sea is beginning to freeze; but on this day, the sun is out, there is no wind and I am sitting on the pontoon of the Zodiac, crying, trying to take in the reality that I am leaving, walking out of the most epic of productions that will continue to play on as if I was never here at all. I want to press pause, stand with Antarctica again, and stay – until the frazil ice sets and the sea ice reforms, until the last Adelie penguin fledges and takes its chances. Until the leopard seals leave for the pack ice.
The boat noses off from the shore and as we motor between ice floes, I look back at Shirley Island and see the sleek grey back of a leopard seal, surrounded by a floating larder of dead penguins.
“The boat noses off from the shore and as we motor between ice floes, I look back at Shirley Island and see the sleek grey back of a leopard seal, surrounded by a floating larder of dead penguins.”
*
Ten years later, a young biologist snorkelling in Antarctica is attacked and drowned by a leopard seal. Another decade on, I watch a documentary in which a large female leopard seal gently approaches a scuba diver and presents him with freshly killed penguin gifts over a period of four days. More recently, a youth records himself patting what he thinks is a dead leopard seal on an Adelaide beach. When it rears up and bares its teeth at the 20 million people who watch the video grab, the leopard seal is once again a pariah.
Life is like that – both villainous and redemptive, and so surprising that we are constantly grappling for explanations and rushing to judgement. Even in nature, on that strung-out line between black and white, between good and evil, it is the gradations that hold more possibilities than we could ever imagine.
Something like the skin of a leopard seal. Shades of grey, with random spots of colour. ▼
This work is part of our Australian Nature Writing Project suite
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