“Migration is inherent to their nature,” Niall says.
“But it doesn’t have to be,” Harriet says. “We live now in a state of necessary adaptation. This is what’s required of them—it is the only means of survival, as it has always been.”
“Haven’t we forced them to adapt to our devastation enough?”
This is what they seem to do in this room: argue for the same things, round and round in circles.
Talk moves to the Arctic terns, for Niall has written often of them, predicting they will be the last birds to survive because of their practice in flying farther than others.
“It doesn’t matter,” another biologist, Olsen Dalgaard from Denmark, says. “Give it five to ten years and they won’t make the distance. With zero sustenance along the way, they can’t.”
“You’re mad if you think carnivorous seabirds will be the last standing,” Harriet tells Niall as though she is about to start taking bets. “It will be the herbivorous marshland species. Only ones with sustained ecology. Fish are gone, Niall.”
“They’re not, actually,” he says calmly, always calm as though he doesn’t care, when I know for a fact that he rarely sleeps due to the force of his terror.
“As good as,” Harriet says.
Niall doesn’t continue arguing, but I know him. He believes the terns will keep flying as long as they must; if there is food anywhere on this planet they will find it.
I excuse myself, tired and wanting fresh air. My snow boots and parka are waiting for me by the door. I slip into them and step out into the wintry world. My feet lead me to the largest enclosure. I’m pretty sure I heard someone say it was half the size of the entire 4,500-square-kilometer park, and all of it with one enormous fence around it. There are wonderful animals here, and not only those native to Scotland but many that have been rescued and introduced to the park in an effort to stop their extinction. Foxes and hares abound, deer and wildcats and lynx, rare red squirrels, elusive little pine martens, hedgehogs, badgers, bears, moose, even wolves lived here once, before the last died. A sanctuary unrivaled by the rest of the world, but only capable of so much. The balance of predator and prey is a delicate one, and these are the last of their kinds.
I wish I could walk through this chain-link fence. The far side of it interests me so much more than this side, but even I wouldn’t be that stupid. Instead I go down to the beach of the loch, which is no ocean but still a great relief to the lungs. I’m not supposed to swim in it, but I do. Just a quick dip into the icy water and out again, scrambling to pull my clothes back on, so much more alive than before. I saw an otter here one day, and melted.
It is a privilege I lucked into when I married Niall. To live here, in this rarest part of the world, where dwell most of the last wild animals. I don’t deserve to be here—I offer nothing except love for a man who offers a great deal. And true love for the creatures. There is that, little may it matter.
I take my time walking back to the dining hall where everyone eats together, except that Niall is still working so I eat on my own and then go to bed in our little cabin. I’m asleep before he returns, as is the way most nights. He tends to be up and gone before I wake, too. The kisses he once left me to dream of dried up some time ago.
* * *
Sleep is difficult tonight. I must be getting a cold because I can’t stop coughing. There is a tickle in my throat and no matter how much water I drink I cannot ease it. Not wanting to wake Niall, I rise and pull on thick socks and a wool sweater. I head to our bathroom. It’s just next to the bedroom but in the dark it feels much farther away than I expect. My feet keep moving, shuffling and colder than they should be. Finally my hand finds the light switch but when I flick it the power is out. It’s cold in the dark bathroom. The air here has grown frigid—perhaps a window was left open. There’s enough light from the red of Niall’s electric razor for me to see the outline of my reflection, and the glow of eyes. I blink, frowning at the way the red bounces off my irises, like an animal in the dark.
The cough comes again, worse this time. My raw throat scrapes and hacks and there’s something there, something scraping at me. I stick my fingers into my mouth, reach right back and feel the brush of a soft, itchy thing. I pull, coughing and spluttering as it cuts free of my throat. I can’t see what it is, but in the sink it feels like a feath—
“Franny,” someone whispers.
I whirl in the dark but it’s only Niall.
Still, my frightened heart doesn’t do as it’s told. It thunders on, knowing something I don’t. He reaches for my neck, a caress, and then a tightening, and my air is gone. In a moment the eerie stillness of the bathroom dissolves and there is a violent twist of limbs as I surge forward and he swings my head into the mirror—
“Wake up!”
I blink and the pain is gone from my throat, gone from my skull, moved to live inside my feet, which are burning. It’s brighter here, wherever I am, silver and no longer red. It’s the forest in deep night, with moonlit snow and stars and my hands are around Niall’s throat.
I gasp in horror and he wrenches himself free, coughing once, twice, then taking my hand and yanking me through the trees.
“Quickly,” he says, softly as though frightened of being overheard.
“Where are we?”
“Inside the enclosure.”
My bare feet falter. Is this a dream?
“Franny, come on.”
“How did we get here?”
“You were asleep. I followed your footprints.” Like a tracker in the night.
I gaze around at the place I’ve longed to enter. Then at Niall, ghostly in the light. “Did I hurt you?” I ask.
His expression softens. “No. But there are hungry animals in here.”
I nod and we hurry. I can see the footprints he followed. They don’t belong to me, but to the woman who lives inside, the one who wants the wild so much that come nightfall she steals her way into my skin. If she can’t have wild, I sometimes think she’s intent on my death instead. Whatever sets her free will do.
We reach a decline and slow our pace to ensure we don’t slip down its edge. At the bottom is a shoulder of the loch, with no beach to protect it, only a steep jutting of hillside. I can see Niall’s intended course—he’s headed close around the loch, as it will bring us more quickly to the fence, but I pull him to a stop.
“I don’t think we should skirt too closely.”
“If we go up and around the ridge it’ll take too long.”
“Come on, we’re fine. Don’t be dramatic.”
“We’re not meant to be in here, Franny. It could get us kicked out.”
“Oh, please, they’re not gonna send you away.”
“Stop,” he snaps suddenly, startling me. “This isn’t an adventure. It’s serious.”
“I know that—”
“I don’t think you do. Nothing is serious for you. You don’t commit to anything.”
We stare at each other in the moonlight.
“I’m committed to you,” I say.
He doesn’t reply, not in words, but the air feels thick. “Come on,” is all he says in the end. “Your feet’ll be frozen already, aye?”
They are indeed, protected by no more than the drenched woolly socks I dreamed of pulling on.
“Put my boots on,” he offers, but I shake my head and take his path, angling down to the water’s edge.
It’s not me who falls, but Niall.
He slips almost soundlessly onto the frozen edge of the loch and then straight through the ice. It must be deep here, for he disappears instantly under the surface.
I step into the water behind him, a knife edge to my spine. The cold, my god. It’s rendered him immobile. But I’ve spent my life in cold water and my body knows how to move, how to reach for him and pull him to the edge. It doesn’t yet know how it’ll get us out; there’s nothing to grip on to but slippery snow. The shore of the lake is like a wall.
“Niall,” I say t
hrough chattering teeth.
He doesn’t speak, so I shake him hard until he nods and lets out a grunt. I scrabble for a hold and painstakingly drag us, hand by hand, around the shoreline until we reach a spot shallow enough to climb out.
“Hold on to the edge,” I order him, then pull myself up onto the snow. It’s so fucking cold. I’m having trouble making my limbs obey. “Niall,” I say, “I can’t pull you out, you have to climb.”
“Can’t.”
“You can—I just did it.”
I can see him trying, but he’s waterlogged and frozen.
“Niall,” I say, “try harder. Do not leave me alone.”
He struggles out of the water and with my arms dragging him, manages to lift his body free. For a moment he slumps on the snow, but I pull at his hands roughly. “Come on, quickly.”
We stumble around the loch, keeping a wider berth this time. Things rustle in the underbrush but we don’t see them, no reflective eyes or shadows in the night. I lock the gate behind us and support him along the path that leads to our cabin. No one has noticed our presence in the enclosure; it will be like tonight never happened.
Except for the cold we have smuggled out with us, deep in our bones.
I run a shower, not too hot, then help Niall out of his clothes. He’s shivering so hard, but once I get him under the running water he starts to calm. I undress and climb in with him, wrapping my arms about his body, pressing what warmth I have into him.
A time later. “Are you all right?”
He nods, reaching to cradle my head. Our lips are against each other’s shoulders. “Just a night dip, aye? You do them all the time.”
I smile. “Aye.”
“Must be your selkie blood,” he murmurs.
“It must.”
“I’ve missed you, darlin’.”
“I’ve missed you.”
“Why do you go?”
I don’t answer at first. “I’m not sure.”
“Can you try to think?”
I turn my mouth to his neck and press it there. Trying. “When I stay,” I whisper, “I think it does harm.”
“I think you’re frightened.”
It brings a kind of relief to admit it. “I am. I always am.”
“That won’t do forever, my love.”
I swallow, remembering the feel of the feather in my throat. “No, it won’t.”
There is a long silence, but for the fall of water.
“My father strangled a man to death,” I tell him softly. “My mother hung herself with a rope about her neck. Edith drowned on the fluid in her lungs. And my body suffocated our daughter.
“I dream of choking, and I wake to find myself trying to steal the air from you. There’s something broken in my family. It’s most broken in me.”
Niall strokes my hair for a long time. Then he says, very clearly, “Your body did not suffocate our daughter. She died, because sometimes babies die before they’re born, and that’s all.” Then, once more, “I’ve missed you.” And I am done with the universe between us. It is so perilous, this love, but he’s right, I will have no cowardice in my life, not anymore, and I will be no small thing, and I will have no small life, and so I find his mouth with mine and we are awake at last, returned to a land long abandoned, the land of each other’s bodies.
It feels an age since I’ve had him, and I am clutching at him as he pulls me tighter, moves callously inside me as though to destroy whatever civilized parts of me still exist, to push me through them into something uncivilized, something barbarous, and as I feel that liberation from my own shame I come with a leap, a bound into the air, a tugging away of something into the wild and lush and out of control, a place where I don’t run or leave, somewhere I am still.
26
MER BASE, CAIRNGORMS NATIONAL PARK, SCOTLAND FOUR YEARS AGO
Niall and I watch her, holding our breaths. When she extends her wings up and back like the Winged Victory I feel my pulse quicken. Her beak, usually orange to match her legs but now sooty for the winter cold, darts upward and then down into the bush. She eats one, two, three grass seeds.
The indrawn breath of the collective viewers is exhaled.
“Good girl,” I whisper.
“See!” Harriet cries. “I knew it. Adaptation.”
Niall is expressionless; for once I have no idea what he’s thinking. To be fair, he never said the birds wouldn’t adapt, only that with a little help from us they might not have to. He’s been working on getting permission to fund fisheries in the Antarctic waters but it’s been—in his words—“about as successful as pushing shit up a hill.” No governments give a rat’s ass about feeding birds when the fisheries could be feeding humans. The apathy is staggering.
I gaze at the Little tern, a smaller seabird than her Arctic brothers and sisters. She would normally migrate to the east coast of Australia if we didn’t have her caged here, eating grass instead of fish.
I wish I could touch her, but it’s strictly forbidden unless absolutely necessary. Not by the base, but by Niall. He says that human touch to an animal is disruptive and cruel. The tern’s mate is louder than she is, giving his distinctive, creaking call. He’s been eating the seeds longer. The female waited and waited, enduring more in the stubborn hope of freedom. For a while it seemed like we would stand here and watch her starve to death, but today, at last, she’s surrendered.
Niall and I head for our cabin. He is silent and introspective.
“What are you thinking?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer.
“Today went well,” I say, not understanding.
He nods.
“So then what?”
“We should have done better for her,” he says. “Harriet thinks it means they’ll change their course and their breeding grounds. Start mating on the coast of Australia or South America.”
“All of the terns?”
He nods.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“It’s smart, finding a species of plant that will withstand inclement weather and grow on most continents. It’s smart, seeing if the birds will eat it, when pressed.”
“But…?”
“I don’t think they’re going to fly around the entire world to eat grass.”
“Harriet’s saying they won’t have to fly around the entire world anymore.”
He flashes me a look that implies I’m a traitor for listening to Harriet. We’re quiet awhile, concentrating on our feet on the slippery ground, on our breath making clouds.
I’m sure we’re both thinking of the creature in her cage.
“You think they’ll keep flying, don’t you,” I say.
Niall nods once, slowly.
“Why?”
“Because it’s in their nature.”
* * *
We leave for Galway in the morning. Christmas with Niall’s parents. The car is waiting to drive us to Edinburgh but first Niall and I go to the bird enclosures to say goodbye. Instinctively we both move to the Little terns. The male is eating his grass seeds again, making do, while the female flies around her cage, around and around, her wings brushing futilely against the metal, forever trying to reach the sky.
I turn away, unable to watch her.
But Niall stands witness, even as I know it must break his heart.
Sterna Paradisaea, SOUTH ATLANTIC OCEAN MATING SEASON
I’m holding the skull of a baby wren. I found it this morning in one of the nests in our yard, right down the back in those willow trees; I think its parents must have left it there when it died. Discarded. Or maybe they waited with it as long as they could. It’s like an eggshell, only much tinier, much more delicate. It barely fits on the tip of my pinkie finger. I keep thinking about how easy it would be to crush. It reminds me of her. But not of you. You are made of a different thing. Something far more enduring. I never saw that thing you spoke of, the one that was missing from the stuffed birds in my lab. I see it now, or its absence. Your absence has never felt crueler. I�
�ve never hated you until now. I’ve never loved you more.
* * *
The letter smells of him, somehow. I’m holding it to my face when—
“’Scuse me, love.”
Ennis is ducking awkwardly beneath the doorframe. I refold Niall’s letter and return it carefully to my pack with the rest. That one was from a particularly dark time, not long after Iris died.
“It’s about to get rough,” Ennis says.
“What should I do?”
“Stay down here. Take your shoes off.”
“In case we have to swim.” The corner of my mouth curls.
Ennis nods. I think he might be excited about the infamous Drake Passage. He has nothing else left but this journey, and in this we are the same. I take no excitement in it, only cell-deep weariness, only a need to see its end.
We no longer have anything to follow. No tracked terns. We can only guess at the birds’ destination, and it seems an age ago that I even saw them moving. How long has it been since I knew they were alive?
Instead of staying in the small bedroom—there is also a simply stocked kitchen, a cramped bathroom, a dining table, and a set of bunk beds that Ennis graciously offered to take—I go up to the helm and stand by the skipper. There is static in the air. A black sky. I can feel the sea waking slowly, readying itself; I can feel it in my gut.
“Do you know how to do this?” I ask softly.
“Do what?” he asks, but he knows what I mean. After a moment he shrugs. We gaze at the dark churning water and the waves growing steadily before us. There is no land yet in sight. “Not sure anyone knows how to do this,” Ennis says.
And then. He turns the wheel hard and steers us sideways up the wall of an oncoming wave, outrunning its hungry crashing teeth, until we reach its lip and sail over its other side, over the steep cliff edge. I let the held breath from my lungs as we plummet down but Ennis is already turning the boat in the opposite direction, sailing up the wall of the next wave and reaching the end just as I think we’ll be tipped backward and swallowed. He does this a long time, zigzagging his way between waves, following and outrunning them, turning always for their gentlest slopes and edges. He maneuvers the tiny craft through the enormity of this most perilous sea; it’s a dance, and it’s quiet, and the sky watches us, and it’s as close as I’ve ever come to feeling utterly at one with an ocean this ferocious.
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