The Tourist Trail (4 page)

Yet during those times Doug tagged along on her nightly trips up the hill—the closest thing to a date she'd had in years—Angela found herself wishing she'd packed something sexier. It felt almost romantic the way Doug, an astronomy major before switching to biology, pointed out the Southern Cross and the creatures of the heavens, like Leo and Pisces. Angela realized that she had been coming to Punta Verde for fifteen years, had identified every square meter of bush, plant, bug, rodent, mammal, and moss, and yet she'd never bothered to tell one star from another. She spent her life looking down.

Doug got her thinking about children for the first time, simply by asking if she had any. But he was only a flirt, only interested in Angela for her knowledge and experience. Perhaps he was angling to co-author a research paper with her, to leapfrog the post-docs. Their profession could be as ruthless as nature itself; not everybody would get the research grants or the honorary professorships, see their names in news articles. With people and with penguins, scarcity drove them to do extreme things.

Even Angela was not immune. A month ago, she nearly flew into a fury when Doug and the others did not show up for an outing, until Shelly told her it was Thanksgiving and they were in town calling their families.

So Angela was glad for a new, albeit mysterious, companion. As they sat together in the dark, she found herself thinking of the body under her filthy work clothes, a body kept in camouflage suddenly yearning to be noticed. A body that had not been touched in a long time. A body that, just now, wanted to remember what it felt like.

She took the bottle when the man offered it to her. With each drink he became a bit more talkative, as did she. He asked for her name, and she told him.

“They call me Aeneas,” he said.

“You're kidding.”

“You've not heard of me?” He appeared surprised. “Surely you've read about me in the papers.”

“We don't exactly get home delivery here.”

He explained the name, an alias, and his pursuers—various coast guards, police bureaus, and intelligence agencies.

“I do battle with whaling ships,” he said.

“Like Greenpeace?” Angela asked.

“They fight with words and water guns,” he said. “We fight with the hulls of our ships. We ram them. We mangle their props.”

“You sink them?”

“On occasion.”

“Is that why you're here?”

“No.”

Angela left it at that. She didn't want to know more, to find out anything worse.

“Are you married?” he asked.

“Do I look like I have time for a marriage? Out here attending to wayward men?”

A sneeze broke the silence that followed.

“What was that?” he asked.

“A penguin.”

“Penguins catch colds?”

“They sneeze to exhale the salt from their beaks.”

“I could probably do the same,” he said, rubbing his nose. “I was married once.”

“You?”

“She was a volunteer. Earnest. A scientist, like you. Told me I was full of shit one day, and I was hooked. We made it official in Ushuaia. Had the ceremony on the ship in middle of the Drake Passage. It's not easy saying
I do
with forty-foot waves lapping at your feet. That time of year, the sun never sets, the body never gets tired. There's a sense of collective euphoria. It's as if you've stepped outside of the world and none of the old rules apply. Eventually, however, you have to head north again. Where there are roads and traffic lights, yards that need to be mowed, bills to be paid. She traveled with me for a while after her tour was up, but I think she thought it was a phase I was going through. She went back to L.A. and waited for me to settle down, to return to her. I didn't. And she divorced me in absentia.”

He took a long drink. “You find that amusing?” he asked.

Angela realized that she had been smiling. “No. It's—it's that word.”

“What word?”

“Absentia. When I was a kid, I used to think absentia was an actual place. I even spent time looking for it in the atlas at the school library.”

“I've been living in absentia for years,” he said. She saw his lips curve upward, into a private smile, as if he'd forgotten she was there. And as the silence lingered, once again she felt left behind.

The bottle was empty, and reluctantly she stood to leave.

“Come here.” In one smooth motion, he stood, grabbed her waist, and kissed her. She felt the scruff of his unshaven face bite her chin as she kissed him back. Then, remembering where they were, she pulled away. “Wait,” she said.

“Wait for what?”

She didn't know. She was certain Doug hadn't followed her; they were as alone as any two people could be. And maybe this was the problem: that a wish, one she could barely admit she'd wished, was being granted.

She began to say something, but he grabbed her again, this time more tightly, and she responded by pushing against him so that he stumbled backward into a quilambay bush. A startled penguin emerged from under him and bit his leg.

“Ouch!” he yelled, flushing out several more penguins, sending them flapping away on their bellies.

Angela attempted to smooth down her jacket, her hair, before turning away. “Good night,” she called out, walking off into the dark.

On the next hill, she stopped and removed her jacket. Her heart was pounding, and she looked back into the darkness. Despite his aggressiveness, she still did not fear him. Mostly, she feared herself, and how close she came to not pushing him away. Instinct served her well in self-defense. But now she was alone again, heading back to an empty trailer.

* * *

The morning was drizzly, the first rainfall in a month. Outside the office, Shelly gathered food requests from the assembled naturalists—energy bars, Doritos, Red Vines—and loaded her bags into the pickup truck.

Then she approached Angela. “Can I bring you anything?” she asked.

“I think we're good here.”

Such departures were frequent at the camp and did not warrant hugs or other displays of affection. Yet Shelly seemed to linger longer than usual. “I'll see if I can scrounge up another satellite transmitter,” she said, and Angela felt herself wince before Shelly added, “As a backup.”

“Right. As a backup.” Angela forced a smile. Shelly climbed into the car with Stacy, and they left for Trelew airport.

Now in charge, Angela sent the team, including a reluctant Doug, south of the camp, and she headed north. During the long walk alone, her mind turned to Diesel. It had been Angela's idea to attach the satellite transmitter to him.

Using a blend of duct tape and super glue, Angela had affixed the transmitter to Diesel's flank on a cold morning in mid-December. The yellow device was about the size of a deck of cards, with rounded edges and a three-inch rubber antenna. Once activated, for up to six weeks the device sent signals at five-minute intervals to a satellite twenty miles above the planet. To conserve battery life, the device shut itself off while the penguin was underwater and out of range. To a satellite, the path of a penguin looked more like Morse code than a continuous line, but Angela could decipher the data, connect the dots, learn where Diesel traveled to fill his belly. The transmitters cost $5,000 each, so it was very important to get them back. The key to getting one returned was selecting a bird that had a reason to return—in other words, a male penguin with a new chick. Shelly had thought it was premature to tag Diesel.
Give him another year
, she said. But Angela had insisted.

Doug had helped, though he'd made it known he did not approve. Although each new generation of transmitter diminished in size, the devices still exerted a drag on a penguin in water, reducing its odds, ever so slightly, of out-swimming a leopard seal or an orca. Doug held Diesel while Angela attached the device. The procedure usually lasted up to an hour, and a penguin usually struggled during every minute. But Diesel was calm. He seemed to enjoy the attention.

It's a southern cross
, Doug had said while looking at Diesel's belly. Angela looked at the dark smudges on his white feathers, how they did indeed form a cross, something she never noticed until now.

What's the point of tracking them
, Doug added,
if the act of doing so reduces their numbers?

Fishing nets do more damage than these devices will ever do
, Angela told him.

This they knew from the dozens of flipper tags they received each year, mailed anonymously from the fishermen who obeyed the
Avise al
request stamped on the back of each tag. Some tags arrived carefully flattened out by hammer, easier to slip into an envelope; others arrived intact, little thin triangles. And Angela always wondered how many tags were left on those ships, or at the bottom of the sea.

Her life was consumed with attrition and its causes. The unreported oil spills, evidenced by the blackened, shivering birds that staggered upon the shores. The plastic six-pack rings that doubled as lassos. The baited long lines, meant for large fish but difficult for any species to resist. And the most acute and least visible cause of all—the food supply. Penguins depended on anchovies and krill, once abundant and ignored by fishermen, now in demand at salmon farms and for multivitamins. Like penguins, fishermen aimed for the food nearest to shore, and because they were more efficient and rapacious, penguins were forced to forage farther and farther from their nests, diminishing the odds of a successful return.

Still walking north, and fifteen minutes away from the research camp, Angela sighted a figure in a yellow jacket atop Beacon Hill. She rushed toward it to find Aeneas straining his eyes over the water. “I told you to stay at the tent,” she said.

“I needed a higher vantage point. I thought I saw my ship.”

But he had not seen his ship, and Angela scolded him as she led him back to his camp. “Do you have to wear that jacket?” she asked.

“You don't like it?”

“It's not exactly camouflage.”

“You should talk,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“With that red hair of yours, I could spot you a mile away.”

Angela felt her face blush at the thought of him watching her, and she was glad for the biting wind.

She had work to do, and she decided that if she was going to harbor a fugitive, she would at least put him to work. She led Aeneas to the furthest reach of the colony, six miles from the park entrance. She could hear him breathing heavily behind her.

“You walk too fast,” he said.

“And you walk too slow,” she countered.

As they hiked along, she began to ignore his harmless taunts. But just as they'd reached the place where she wanted to begin the census, he gave a startled shout, and she turned to see him with one leg knee deep in the ground. He had collapsed a penguin burrow, apparently twisting his ankle. She bent down to assess the damage—to the nest, not him—and was relieved to find the burrow empty.

“You ruined the nest,” she said.

“This place is a mine field.”

“It's not any easier for the penguins, but they manage. We're a mile inland, and look at all these nests. It takes a penguin two hours to get here. But they do it all the time, and they don't complain. And they don't collapse each others' nests.”

Aeneas grunted as he pulled himself up. Angela ignored his grimace and his limp as she pulled out a five-meter length of rope, her notebook, and Shelly's map of the colony. By counting penguins within five-meter circular plots placed twenty meters apart, they'd get a reasonably accurate population estimate. And although Angela had been doing this on her own, finding the edges of a circle was best accomplished with two people. She stood Aeneas in the middle of one of Shelly's mapped circles, a measured piece of rope in one hand, her notebook in the other, while she walked the perimeter, holding the other end of the rope, calling out what she found: single male, active pair, one egg, two eggs, inactive nest.

“So is the colony growing or shrinking?” he asked.

“Shrinking. Though I can't say how much. That's why we're here.”

“How many of these circles do we have to do?” he asked.

“You have somewhere better to be?”

“I'm just curious.”

“A hundred or so,” Angela said. “I could try calling your ship from our research station.”

“They'll call me. Fortunately, my satphone is waterproof,” he said. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

She didn't answer him. He'd been there for two nights now, and Angela wasn't sure how long she could keep him hidden from the rest. At least keeping him close to her kept him away from the others. The circles would last for another day or so, and then what? He drank too much. He continued to reach for her, beginning with her shoulder, resting a hand, then two, massaging her neck. She no longer resisted. When he drank he also talked, and she found his stories exciting.