What worried the little female seal most was how swollen her belly was. She worried that she wouldn’t be able to launch herself high enough to get up and into the school of herded fish. And while she worried, her belly grew and grew until she realised it was now or never. He was right. Soon she would have a pup and then she couldn’t leave, even if she wanted to.

Her worries in that regard weren’t unfounded, but what should have worried her more was actually finding her friend. The ocean is so big. There are seamounts and islands and all the different fish and whales and dolphins and birds floating and diving. There are crabs and crayfish and octopuses and squid and great forests of swaying weed. There are glittering hazes of bioluminescence and clouds of krill so fine they get lodged in your orifices if you swim through them (when she was a half-pup she had one whispering in her ear for a week, until it died and fell out). There are boats and there are sharks, big and small. There are packs of orcas that roam and comb, hunting. And in between all these things there is so much water unbroken and rolling. So much water. There are currents and other currents, crisscrossed with gyres and undercurrents and eddies, muddled by tides and swells.

The ocean is so big and he is only a small seal. Despite her swelling belly, she is smaller yet.

She swam, rushing south on the first tendrils of the current, which were curling down from the warmer waters to the north. She chased fish and birds and drifted on her back, with her flippers outstretched and the tight bulge of her pup held up to the sun or stars, only when she needed to sleep.

The ocean is so big, but on the current she reached the haul-out—a cluster of rocky islands, which, at this point in the season sat just south-west of the current’s creeping range—within days. She knew it was the haul-out. She could smell and hear the horde of male seals lounging and wrestling and gorging and shitting—preparing themselves for the fast-approaching harem season.

She stopped and drifted, spiralling slowly for a bit, thinking. Her pup shifted in her belly and made her piss. It marked the water around her female, which left her worried. She had no idea what to do.

They are harems for a reason. It would be dangerous, this close to harem season, for a lone female like her to go to the haul-out. So how was she supposed to find her friend?

Why didn’t she swim south with him when she had the chance? Why did she hesitate? And why was she stupid enough to come now?

He had made it sound so easy. I’ll be waiting for you, he’d told her. If you come, I’ll find you, he had said.