Chapter 6
I lay stiff as a log, staring up at the roof of the tent. I could smell Sam’s deodorant, or whatever he used. It was woodsy and intoxicating.
I wished the top of the tent was open so I could look at the sky and count the stars.
There was no way I was going to fall asleep.
Sam was snoring very softly beside me. I turned my head slightly to look at him.
His back was facing me. With my eyes I traced the outline of his strong shoulders, the muscles of his bulging biceps.
I had always felt the ridiculous urge to bite into those muscles.
It was one of my favorite parts of his body.
When we were younger and went off exploring the trails in Alaska, he would often carry me on his shoulders.
I used to tire out quickly. Not anymore, thank goodness — but I missed those days when I could be close to him without my raging attraction getting in the way.
Sam had never had a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend, for that matter.
I could never get a read on what he thought about me.
I knew he cared about me obviously, but did he ever feel anything more than that?
And did he know how I felt about him? I hated that I was such an open book.
Both Grant and Daniel had clocked my crush on Sam within a few days of meeting me.
Yet Sam had never given any indication. Maybe he was just one of those people who were not interested in anything romantic. He definitely was the independent type.
“Viktor?” Sam’s sleepy voice jolted me back to reality. At some point he had turned and was now facing me. I stared at him.
“Everything OK?” he mumbled, his eyes still closed, as if in his sleep he was still tracking whether I was fine.
“Yeah, everything is OK. Go back to sleep,” I answered softly.
He mumbled something else and then his breathing evened out. I lay there for god knows how long. But even my hard-on couldn’t stop the exhaustion that had overcome me. Sam’s rhythmic breathing lulled me into a deep sleep.
***
Next morning, I worked the perimeter slowly, binoculars up, logging each sighting on my tablet. The colony ran along the elevated spine of the island, nests packed onto every flat or slightly elevated surface the rock offered.
Sam was twenty meters behind me, pack on.
I raised the binoculars looking for Blue 47.
He was a male that I’d been tracking for four years.
He and his female got together every season.
Blue 47 had a funny personality and I had bonded with him because in my mind he seemed to appreciate my sense of humor.
He was a champion in stealing stones to build his nest. His nest was usually the best too. Sneaky bastard.
This season had started like others. Waypoint station’s long term research dataset was well known, even available to public.
We had been tracking these birds over a very long time period.
I had been monitoring Blue 47 and his partner’s journey but then eleven days back I lost her signal.
Since then I’d been checking in daily. No luck.
I was eager to verify with my own eyes that everything was okay.
Sam came up beside me. “There,” he pointed out.
I swung my binoculars. He was there but he was on the nest alone. The chick was tucked under his brood pouch, just the grey fuzzy head visible, poking out from beneath Blue 47’s belly feathers and looking at nothing in particular with the unfocused alertness of something very new.
Blue 47 stood over it with his flippers slightly out from his body and his head up, scanning the colony perimeter in the slow rotation that paired adults share between them — one brooding, one watching, back and forth across the day.
“She’s gone,” I said.
Sam looked at the nest, his expression matching mine. Nature was brutal. She was cold and ruthless showing favor to none. But sometimes we formed attachments.
“Eleven days. They don’t go eleven days, not with a chick this young.”
“Leopard seal?” Sam said.
“Most likely. This stretch of water between here and the station has been active this season. Grant flagged several sightings last week from the Zodiac.”
I looked back at the nest. Blue 47’s head turned slowly, completing the arc, coming back around. “Could have been bycatch. There are longliners working further out. She could have followed the krill too far.”
“But you think seal.”
“I think seal.”
Blue 47 shifted his weight, settled the chick further under the brood pouch, went back to scanning.
“He doesn’t know to stop watching for her,” I said. “That rotation they do — it’s just running. He’s still doing his half of it.”
Sam looked at the nest a moment longer. Then he said, quietly, “How old is the chick?”
“Eight days. Maybe nine.”
“He can raise it alone?”
“Some do. Survival rate drops significantly without the foraging rotation. He has to leave the chick exposed to go feed himself and that opens the creche window earlier than it should. The chick is vulnerable to skua predation during those gaps.”
With a heavy heart, I logged the observation, noting the female’s continued absence and Blue 47’s solo brooding status. “He’s a good bird. Six clutches. He knows what he’s doing. But it’s harder alone.”
Sam said nothing but he put his arm around me and pulled me close. We stood there for long minutes. The colony noise ran around us and Blue 47 kept his slow watch and the chick’s grey head moved slightly under the brood pouch, settling.
“Coffee break?” Sam asked.
“Yeah,” I agreed and closed the tablet shut.
We walked over to a flat shelf of rock at the island’s western edge, facing the water. Sam poured from the thermos — coffee, steam rising in the cold air. He poured mine first and handed it across.
I wrapped both hands around the cup.
A pair of skuas worked above the island’s spine, banking in slow circles.
“The weather was stable eleven days ago.” I drank the coffee. “A healthy adult in good condition doesn’t just fail to come back in stable weather. She was at good weight at the last log. There was no storm event in the window.”
Sam turned the thermos cup in his hands and nodded slowly. A skua dropped toward the colony edge and both of us watched it until it pulled up and banked away without landing.
The first drops of rain came without announcement. The light shifted and then the drops were there, small and cold, horizontal on a wind that arrived from the southwest all at once.
“Damn,” I hurriedly stood up.
Both of us had been taken by surprise but weather turns like this were common. The rain started gaining momentum. Sam was already breaking down the scope. I grabbed the tripod legs and collapsed them while he unclipped the scope head and wrapped it.
We worked fast without talking — the equipment pack sequence was the same every time. Scope into the case, tripod into the pack sleeve, data tablet into the dry bag, dry bag sealed and clipped. Sam shouldered the pack and I took the equipment case and we rushed back.
Across the colony the effect was immediate. Adults on nests flattened their posture, pulling their heads down and rounding their backs against the weather. The creche clusters tightened. The chicks pushed inward against each other.
Blue 47 sat on his nest and did not move at all.
“Hang in there, buddy,” I murmured to him as we passed by his portion of the perimeter.
The path back to the tent crossed a low ridge of exposed rock.
The rain hit harder on the ridge with nothing to break the wind.
It came in off the water at a low angle, small and sharp against any exposed skin.
I pulled my collar up and kept my head down and watched my footing on the wet rock.
Behind me I could hear Sam’s boots on the same surface, the same careful placement on the same wet angles.
The tent appeared below us, yellow against the grey rock, the fly drumming in uneven bursts as the gusts moved through.
Sam unzipped the outer fly while I ducked under the overhang and unclipped my pack.
The sound inside was amplified — against the fly, against the tent body, against the rock around us — irregular and loud when the wind came and then briefly quieter in the lulls.
We shed the outer layers in a corner away from our sleeping bag. Water ran off the sleeves and dripped onto the ground. I unlaced my boots and set them at the entrance. Sam did the same and went to start the water to boil. Fresh coffee under rain in a tent was the best experience.
I sat cross-legged on the sleeping pad and pulled out the tablet.
I worked through the data we had gathered.
The rain gusted against the fly and the tent shuddered once and steadied.
Outside, the colony noise had faded some — the wind and the rain loud and somewhere underneath it the faint continuous sound of the creche, smaller now, tighter, waiting out the same weather we were.
Sam came over to me and handed me a hot mug and then settled down next to me. There wasn’t much room to spread out anyhow. But he sat extra close I thought. Almost like he was trying to offer me comfort.
I turned on my laptop and using both the screens did some calculations.
Sam pulled a book from his pack and leaned against the crates behind us and started reading.
Fieldwork could be a lot of hours of sitting inside tent when the weather was bad.
I loved it because it meant I got to be with Sam like this, away from everyone.
At some point, I felt him slip a earbud in my right ear. Sam had an amazing collection of songs. He would often share one of his earbuds and we would listen to the same songs as we worked on our own things. I glanced up at him in the dim light of the tent. He was looking at me, eyes dark and warm.
“Still thinking about Blue?” he asked.
I sipped my coffee and looked away. “I know they don’t feel emotions to the extent we do, obviously. But they were together. And he is now a single dad. Nature is brutal. I just…it makes me think of…” I trailed off. I was being too emotional over a damn bird.
“Of?” He promoted in a low voice.
“Of us,” I exhaled.
“Us?”
“You and me. Obviously we aren’t a bird couple or raising a chick. But I…I can’t imagine what I would do if something were to happen to you.”
Sam didn’t say anything. I think he felt it too. The circle of life and all that shit. Damn, I hated emotions.
The rain poured on for the rest of the day and we spent it reading, talking, and working. We managed to duck out of the tent for a few minutes, braving the rain, and launch the drone for another full flight. Even if we couldn’t be out there collecting data, it could.
When bedtime came, I felt tired enough to not be thinking of our sleeping situation. It was going to be just fine. I’d slept marvelously last night. Sleeping next to Sam was the best sleeping aid.