She rushed at the surface and launched herself, gasping, up into the air, kicking her tail as hard as she could (she hopes). But it was no use. She barely managed to breach her shoulders. And then her pup started wriggling and thrashing so ferociously it was all she could do to float. She drifted, racked by cramps, away from the herded school and towards the horizon, on the outgoing tide.

She is too small. It is too big, this thing inside her. It takes over her body and she has no choice but to let it.

When it finally calmed she decided to return to the female waters. She was getting too close to pupping to be this far south, to be this far from her harem. And it was getting too big and too busy in her belly.

Because she couldn’t launch herself into the tightly herded school, she did not get to ride in a roaring box and so she had to swim back north, hugging the coast so as to avoid the current, which was flowing in the opposite direction to where she needed to go.

She swam, gorged herself, swam, napped, gorged herself, swam. She floated supine whenever the pup thrashed inside her, holding her belly to the sun or stars and moon as she drifted.

She reached a deep horseshoe bay and she chased a school of trevally into a grove of weed. The weed swayed up from an overhang; beneath it, she spotted the suckered coil of an octopus limb. Floating upside-down, she sculled at the water with her flippers, sweeping the weed out of the way so she could better see it. But she could see nothing. The octopus had squirted a miasma of ink into her face, telling her to leave. Imploring, demanding that the little seal leave her to her eggs.

The ink cleared away in stringy, black wisps, and there the octopus was: folded into a maze of limbs that didn’t start or finish, that simply curled and flowed in a mess of pulsing suckers. The octopus was staring back at the seal, her eyes never leaving the seal’s as she stubbornly jetted water at the thousands of eggs she had strung about the cave. They clung, like strings of bright white, baubly seaweed, to the rocks and each time she fanned water at them, they rippled.

Strangely, the octopus smelled a bit of human. The little seal wondered what the octopus might have done to collect that scent in its slime.

This is where the seal is, now. She is hovering, watching the octopus. Every now and then, she surfaces for air. She has eaten two wrasse and one morwong. She has been floating there so long, and so calmly, they all but swam into her mouth. Twice, she nearly ate the octopus. She still might. But for now, she is happy enough watching—biding her time while her pup writhes inside her.