I recognise behind his grin the dazed shock that I’d felt four days ago. His grin’s fixed. It’s a king-hit. I go outside and change my clothes and Blanca wipes off the beard and Mark takes away the men’s clothes and I return to the room and talk to the expeditioners about press conferences and police scanners and microphones and deadlines and cadets. I sense surprise and attention and there’s laughter through it and long warm applause at the end of it. People crowd around me.

‘I’m so glad you did that. It had to be done. A lot of us wouldn’t be brave enough,’ says Meg. She’s grinning like a split watermelon. It’s damn good to see it.

Max steps up to me. ‘You’re the hero of the ship, Fin.’

Blanca hugs me. ‘Your face is a new face, darling. It is so open and alive. It is very different. It is very good.’

Andrea, behind her, says nothing.

The ship slides up to a floe and the white-suited gladiators are dropped overboard again. The seal’s quickly caught and we cheer like football spectators on the bow. Then grow quiet as we watch Meg on the ice suddenly pumping the animal’s tail. She does it for a very long time. Then she stops and falls into a crouch in the snow beside the still seal. Jack swiftly drops next to her. The rest of the capture team step back. Blunt words are spoken by Jack from the ice to the ship via the walkie-talkie. They’re relayed quickly among the expeditioners. The animal has died.

The seal’s limp body is cradled in a net and swung high onto the trawl deck. A postmortem’s to be carried out. A crowd gathers on the deck. Max’s eyes don’t see me when I smile my sympathy to him. Meg tells the crowd to move on. Her voice is tight.

‘It’s nature,’ someone says loudly. But the crowd reluctantly drifts.

Max, drained, tells me later in the corridor that when the flesh of the belly was slit the vets discovered the animal was a pregnant female three weeks away from pupping. He doesn’t say anything more and there are tears in his eyes and a great heaviness and weariness about him.

‘Oh Max. I’m so sorry.’

‘We think it was the trauma of the capture program. You know, the corralling of the seal, the net and the wrestling it still. It’s pretty brutal stuff.’

The seal was sticking close to her partner. The gladiator capturers had to work hard to separate the two of them. The male hung around, persistent and panicked, after the capture of his mate. Max had to stand over him, to stop him from coming too close.