‘I used to feed her,’ Gerrit said. ‘Stopped eventually. Not good for them to become too complacent. She’s a ringed seal. In the Arctic, they have to fight to survive on their own. You don’t usually find them this far south. A storm drove her into my arms when she was just a pup. She’s lucky the sea delivered her to me instead of a polar bear or a hunter who might have taken her skin.’

‘And you named her Hilde? Don’t you think that’s a bit morbid?’

I expected him to meet my surliness with a frown, but he only smiled. ‘I thought it was sort of fitting. She showed up the year after Hilde died, almost as if she’d been sent. Something had taken a chunk out of her hind flipper and the wound had got infected. You should’ve smelled the rot! Thankfully, it healed fine. She stayed with us about a year, over at the Seal Sanctuary. When she was ready to go, she bit me, not hard, just enough to let me know she was feeling better and it was time for me to get lost so she could move on. Ringed seals are largely solitary. They don’t go in for big families. Couldn’t fit many seals in those narrow snow lairs they build to keep out predators.’

‘Does she ever come ashore?’

He shook his head.

‘You could wade out there,’ I suggested. ‘Check the flipper. Then you’d know for sure if it was really her.’

‘Could do.’

‘But you won’t.’

He smiled, a little sadly. The seal continued watching us from the safety of the water, her body rocked by small waves. She was a plump little thing, her square-shaped head resting on a stumpy neck. Compared to the huge sea lions I’d seen back home zipping merrily around the warm waters near Newcastle and Port Macquarie, Hilde was small and stocky. All that precious fat protected her, I presumed, from freezing to death in the Arctic currents. I tried to imagine what my mother would have said after learning her name had been given to a fish-eating mammal. Would she have laughed or frowned? She had never been overly fond of animals. Not domestic pets, anyway. I’d once waged a summer-long campaign, hoping to convince her to let me buy a parrot from a bird breeder on the mainland. I must have been ten or eleven at the time and none of my earnest promises to clean up its mess and take care of it seemed to make any impression. In the end, worn down by my incessant whining, she snapped at me over breakfast, throwing down her spoon so it struck the edge of the plate, reanimating the toast crusts.

‘Birds are meant to be wild, Josefiene. How would you like to be caged up all day? Shall I lock you in your room so you can try?’

‘But I’ll keep it in my bedroom! I’ll let it fly every day. It can live on top of my cupboard. I can train it to do tricks.’