Science Lesson

The night after we killed the seal, I ate pork and beans for dinner, right out of the can. The seal was endangered, in the prime of his life, his death a terrible accident. Ben went to his tent. I went to mine. Sleep didn’t come.

I got up and walked down to the water’s edge where the seal had died. With no moon overhead, the Milky Way’s zillion stars lit up the sky. We’d injected the seal with a sedative, a heavy dose, sure, but well within the safe range for his big size. The objective had been to take his measurements—length from nose to tail and girth around the belly below his pectoral fins—and collect blood, skin, saliva, and fecal samples. Then, pierce his rear flipper and slide in a plastic tag with a unique ID number, enabling us to track him throughout his life. It wasn’t a risky procedure. We’d done it many times that summer.

“Have you ever killed a seal before?” Ben asked before he turned in.

I hadn’t. This was my first field season.

We had approached him on the sand from behind, using a hoop net to catch him. It didn’t take much wrangling before the sedative took effect, and he settled down. The seal had been so close to entering the sea and diving to depths of three and five hundred feet to nose around for lobsters and eels hidden in the crevices of coral and under rocks, using an adaptive technique evolved over millions of years to stay submerged, slowing his heart rate to single digits per minute, something called bradycardia.

“We didn’t do anything wrong.” Ben said. “It happens. Sometimes.”

I was supposed to watch his respirations, count his breaths, and I did. But seals are good at camouflaging their inhalations and exhalations. I wasn’t sure when he took his last breath. It was Ben who first realized something was wrong. He lifted the seal’s muzzle and slapped his nose, pinched the skin between the bones of his fore-flipper to trigger a startle reflex, injected him with a reversal drug, stuck him with epinephrine, intubated him, pumped air into his chest, anything to pull him back from the deepest dive of his life.

It wasn’t until Ben pulled out his stethoscope, placed it on the seal’s side, then sat back on his heels, wrapped the scope around his neck like doctors do, and shook his head that I got it. In saving seals, you sometimes lose them.

“I lost one years ago,” Ben said before he went to sleep. “I’ll never forget it.”

No waves broke inside the lagoon, stars sizzling on its surface. I followed the seal’s trail in reverse, from the ocean’s edge where he’d died to the spot on the beach he’d left hours before, his sleeping pit, where he’d wriggled and rested and rolled around during the last night of his life. I crawled inside the sandy pit, curled in a ball, catching musky whiffs of wild seal whenever the land breeze blew.

Kim Steutermann Rogers spent a month in Alaska at Storyknife Writers Retreat in 2016 and, again, in 2021. She was recognized for “Notable Travel Writing 2019” in Best American Travel Writing. Her science journalism has been published in National Geographic, Audubon, and Smithsonian; and her prose in Atticus Review, Bending Genres, Hawai`i Pacific Review and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and dog in Hawai`i. Read more of her work at kimsrogers.com and follow her on social media at @kimsrogers.

Published January 30 2022