He knows this alpha. He watched him closely this last harem season as he wasted from muscled bull to spent skeleton. He’s lucky. The alpha has only bulked back half his fat and muscle and he’s lazy with a full belly of squid. If it were just before harem season he would have been twice as vast and twice as testy. He would have likely used his teeth. Last harem season, the little male seal watched a would-be-alpha, who contested the alpha for mating territory, wither and die starving with a ripped-out throat. The little male seal then watched the alpha roar and mount his friend. Her tiny body was flattened under his weight.

If you are male you are pup, then you are half-pup, then you are beta-half-pup and you have to swim south to a haul-out. You stay there for two or three seasons and you come back full-beta. When you are full-beta, you live at the haul-out and return north for every harem season. One day you might win a harem and become alpha.

If you are female you are pup, then you are half-pup, then you are beta-ready and you are invited into a harem. You are mounted and then you become beta, with your teats that ooze thick milk and your hungry new pup each season, and, of course, your harem. Harems are not fixed groupings; females join them and leave them as they desire each season, although they often stay the same. Sister-beta bonds run deep.

He and his friend were pups together, and they darted and spiralled beneath the waves and wrestled on the shore, and piled on top of each other while they slept. Then they were half-pups and they herded schools of silver fish together and gorged themselves. They preferred the crisp, clean flesh of the trevally to the metallic tang of the couta or the oily meat of the mackerel. They trapped octopuses in caves and then played tug-of-war with their stretchy bodies—that was her favourite game. His favourite was when they would see how deep they could swim, mostly so they could listen to the way whale calls echoed in layers through different depths of ocean. They would dive deeper and deeper until the whales’ yowling blended unbearably with the pressure in their ears and they would have to shoot back to the surface.

Then, this last harem season, she became beta-ready, which surprised them both.

She told him in low grunts and murmuring barks that she had always thought the males signalled to you that you were ready when their thick pink cocks poked out at you through their fur. But she knew she was ready before the males arrived and fought for territories.

He rubbed his body against hers, this way, then that, to ask: How?