A crane has lifted me high in a cargo cage over the side of the ship and placed me with a thud on the snow. I’m going to record the sounds of a seal capture. A team of ten expeditioners is to throw a net over a basking crabeater seal, then wrestle it still, dope it and glue a plastic box onto its back, then let it go. The box will be tracked by a satellite that sends its data to a computer in Paris. The aim’s to monitor the behavioural patterns of the crabeaters. They’re the most elusive and unstudied of the seals, because they live entirely in the water or on the floating pack ice around Antarctica. The head of the team is Jack. Max is working with him, helping out as a volunteer. He’s taken leave from his desk job to give Jack a hand. And to see Antarctica. Max got me onto the ice.

I switch on the tape recorder in its esky.

Beside me on the floe eight people are lying on top of a seal. It’s two metres long and it’s struggling violently. It’s barking and huffing and growling. There’s a lot of fuck fuck fuck and shit and Jesus Christ and hold him from the men, and the rip of their thin white camouflage suits in the strain of forcing the animal still. Finally, the seal’s stopped. There’s quiet. Someone says thank the Lord for small mercies. Meg, the team vet, comes up close and in a swift action the needle’s in deep.

The people holding the seal fall back. The animal’s slow, loud, laboured breathing sounds human, tenderly so, as it surrenders to the anaesthetic and is vastly asleep.

‘Under,’ says Meg crisply, checking and clicking her stopwatch with a snap.

A thick sludge of superglue is hurriedly mixed with a painter’s trowel and caked in a slab on the seal’s furry back. A plumber and a diesel mechanic and two electricians kneel in the snow and blow the glue dry. Their concentrating, panicked lips blow faster and faster as the seal groggily comes out of the anaesthetic quicker than expected. Max stands with a pen and clipboard above them, his forehead set with tension. Jack’s quiet, at the seal’s head.