He shook himself out of these thoughts and turned his mind to the task at hand. ‘All right, everyone, gather round. Bring your mikes and pair off.’
He helped the students lower the hydrophones into the water. They needed to be positioned carefully so that the sensors were facing the source of the sound. There was one headset for every two people.
‘What’s the depth?’ he yelled to Buck.
‘Thirty feet.’
‘OK, lower the hydros to twenty feet and turn the sensors to face the sandbanks. And get your headphones on,’ he shouted to the students.
Seal talk, Kemp called it. Down there in the waters around the sandbanks the seals would be sending their rumbling signals to each other, warning of dangerous intruders. It was a language he knew well, and there were times when he felt he could half guess the meaning of these long underwater conversations. But the real code he had yet to crack.
He had made his name at St Andrews, where an unusually generous subsidy from a government determined to prove it cared about its maritime heritage had led to the establishment of the Sea Mammal Research Unit. Out of curiosity, on a field trip to the north of Scotland he had lowered his hydrophones into 100 feet of water below the mile-long Cromarty Firth Bridge that carries the A9 road north from the Black Isle. The waters there were rich in fish and heavily populated with seals. With Loch Ness only a few miles to the west it was no surprise that the coast was also rich in marine mythology.
The fishermen working out of the deep-water ports of Inverness and Aberdeen had plenty of stories about seals and how they could talk and sing. Even today the older generation who crew the deep-sea trawlers out of Scotland recount the Celtic myths about the selkies, the seals who come ashore, shedding their skin to take human shape as beautiful women. The stories vary little among the fishing communities around the Celtic rim of Britain – the Orkneys, the Hebrides and the Aran Islands off the Irish coast: a seal in human form bewitches and marries a local fisherman only to flee back to the sea, sometimes years later, leaving behind motherless children, broken hearts and empty beds.
Science paid no attention to such fantasies, of course, and at first Kemp thought his own discoveries would be treated in the same light. No one had ever identified and recorded the language of seals until that day in 1992 when his hydrophones had picked up low rumbling noises. At other times he picked up a crescendo of noise, like a bowling ball and the crash of skittles. At first he thought that it was trucks passing over the Cromarty Bridge above him. But the strange rumbling noise continued after the trucks had gone. There, 100 feet down in the darkness of the estuary, harbour seals were making sounds no one had heard before – or if they had heard them, they certainly had not been identified as seal talk.
Kemp had taken his tapes back to the university and played them to his boss at the research unit. Professor Melrose Stubbs had listened, eyes fastened on the revolving spools of tape, smoke from a clenched pipe drifting out of the window.
‘No one’s heard this before?’
‘If they have, they didn’t know what it was.’
‘And you do?’
‘Harbour seals. There was nothing else down there.’
‘And if I said, “So what?”’
Typical Stubbs. He was as impressed as hell, but hated showing it. He delighted in the counter-intuitive challenge, and always insisted on making his students work hard for the answer that he already knew.
So Leo told him what they both knew: that identifying the language of creatures that had been on the planet longer than humans was the start of a scientific journey to unlock the minds of those with whom we share this earth.
They had had a celebratory drink that night, first at the small bar next to the old Cross Keys Hotel, and then back at Stubbs’s flat in Hope Street. It was four o’clock in the morning and light when he and a few collegues straggled down to the West Sands and fell down on the dunes to watch the sun come up over the bay. Freezing cold, of course, but with that much whisky inside them it didn’t matter.
And then, their darkened heads just visible over the waves, a pod of grey seals appeared with the sun, slipping through the water, hunting for sand eels and flat fish that had come in with the tide.
It was a magical moment. And Margot had been somewhere in the crowd that had collected as the party gathered pace throughout the evening; a young primary-school teacher who hung out with the junior academics looking for a little intellectual stimulation and a break from the boredom of cramming maths into the minds of 9-year-olds.
After the publication of his paper ‘Underwater Vocalisation of the North Sea Harbour and Grey Seal’, Kemp’s reputation in the small and cloistered world of sea-mammal research was born. Invitations to speak came from the most prestigious institutions, the ocean sciences department at the University of California Santa Cruz and the Australian Institute of Marine Science among them
But as Stubbs had said after a final few puffs on his pipe: ‘Finding a new language is one thing – now you’ve got to decode it, laddie, and tell us what it means.’
Mating signals, flirtation, the language of sexual desire and long-distance communications between pods of seals as much as fifty or sixty miles apart – that was what it meant. Using mikes attached to old lobster pots, Kemp had been able to plot the position of the seals below water by listening to the rumbling exchanges that would continue for thirty to forty minutes at a time.
As he eavesdropped on three or four seals talking to each other over an area of two square miles, Kemp did not know who else was listening in on this amorous chit-chat. But he was certain that others were joining in the conversation. Sound travels long distances underwater. Far out in the North Sea, female harbour seals would hear – and, who knows, respond to – the love calls from the Scottish coast.
The vision had stayed with him. There in the Cromarty Firth, seals swimming 100 feet below the surface had been talking to each other, singing love songs and what else? He knew seals had developed acoustic predator recognition. Their sensitive whiskers were like radar scanners and could detect the presence, even miles away, of killer whales. So amid the love talk there would also be warning signals sent rumbling over the seabed: a pod of whales had been detected heading north two miles offshore, maybe mammal-eaters, maybe not.
Later, diving off the Isle of May off the Fife coast, Kemp had seen harbour seals sitting on rocky outcrops fifty to eighty feet underwater. He could not see any facial signs of conversation, or hear their signals, but he knew they would be sending out those extraordinary sounds to alert other seals in the area to his presence. The sight of a diver in their own territory evoked a playful response from the seals, which swam up and peered through his face mask, gently nudging him with their snouts, pushing him back out of their kingdom.
Leo switched his attention back to the exercise. The students were now absorbed in their work, squatting on the deck, heads bowed as they listened to the sounds below the surface. On the Sony recording deck needles flickered on the dials, showing that recording was in progress.
Leo loved this part of the field trips. He wanted his students to feel the same thrill he had when he first dropped his probes into the peaty waters of the Cromarty Firth. He wanted them to experience the fascination of a world below the waves where seals, whales and dolphins communicated in the languages of their species. Once you had heard that submarine conversational chatter, exchanging information about mating, eating and danger – and who knows what else – the questions never ceased.
Buck was having a cigarette behind the cabin and sipping a mug of wozza – his little joke: it wozza cup of coffee before I put some rum into it. But the rum was no joke. Good 40 per cent proof with a kick that came all the way from the Caribbean. Old sea dogs only drink rum, Buck said, although he did sometimes use Diet Coke as a mixer, proving that even old dogs can learn new tricks.
The sea was choppier now, and the sky had darkened. The students were intent on their task, and Leo could see
from their faces and the furious notes they were scribbling that they too were coming under the spell of the underwater world they were listening into.
There were sixty or seventy seals hauled up on three sandbars; as many again would be in the water around the banks. Kemp checked his watch. It was three o’clock. They had been out almost four hours.
On the sandbanks, one or two of the older seals had stiffened and raised their heads, looking seaward. The sky was darkening fast. The horizon was closing in. Where cloud and water met in a palette of grey and black, a thin white line had formed.
A sudden swell, six feet or so from trough to peak, lifted the boat, sending students sprawling and sliding across the deck.
As the wave struck, Buck was already moving quickly towards the cabin.
‘Haul up the mikes!’ Kemp yelled, lurching across the transom deck as another swell lifted the boat.
‘Get in the cabin – now!’ shouted Buck. ‘Leave the mikes!’
The tug’s engines kicked into life. Kemp reached the cabin as Buck was spinning the wheel, bringing the bow round to face seaward.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ said Kemp. ‘Those mikes cost money!’
Buck tossed him the binoculars.
‘Small-bore tsunami. It happens now and then. Get everyone into the cabin, and dump the mikes.’
Kemp didn’t need binoculars to see the thin white line of surf moving fast a mile or less away. A flash of lightning lit the foam-flecked waves. It began raining hard, grey stair rods falling from the lowering cloud base.
Kemp saw the last of the seals, a mother heavy with pup, waddling urgently into the water.
‘In here!’ Kemp shouted at the students. The Norwegian girl was bent over the transom being sick. One of the British students tried to put his arm around her, but she shrugged it off.
Kemp ran down to the deck and pulled the girl round. Her face was white, and she doubled up and retched over his shoes. The deck surged below them as he half dragged her up the steps into the cabin, where the rest of the students were now jammed in behind Buck.
‘What’s happening?’ asked Jacob Sylvester, a faint trace of alarm in his voice.
‘Nothing. It’s OK, just weather,’ said Buck, his voice thick and heavy.
Christ, he’s drunk, Kemp thought.
The tug was still swinging round to seaward when the sandbanks suddenly emerged from the water as if propelled upwards by a hidden hand.
Kemp and Buck exchanged a glance: the tidal pull of a tsunami gathering the sea to strengthen the wave that would break over them.
Kemp had heard of freak waves rolling out of the Atlantic and overwhelming fishing boats. He had heard old men’s tales of small-bores when the tide, wind, waves and maybe the marginal movement of the seabed in the deeps between Greenland and Newfoundland combined to start a ripple 1,000 miles off the coast that quickly became a fast-moving wave. Very rare, he told himself, and nothing like the great tsunami in the Far East that crashed into the headlines in the last days of 2004, leaving thousands of dead washed up on the evening news.
Down on the transom the $10,000 tape deck lay with its mikes and headphones still plugged in, getting wet, very wet. Leo pushed through his students and took a look out of the cabin window. Dump the mikes? What was Buck talking about? He wanted his job back. He needed that tape deck. Insurance? My tape deck got soaked in a sudden storm. Forget it.
He could make it. He had thirty seconds maybe. The wave was still about 400 yards away, its foaming crest gleaming bright in the gloaming that had descended. He had time.
Above the engine noise he heard Buck shouting as he leapt down the stairs to the deck. He slipped as he ran across rain-slicked decking. At the exact moment that he reached the far end of the transom and raised the $10,000-worth of recording equipment to his chest the bow lifted, the wave broke over the foredeck and surged the length of the vessel. The last thing he saw was white, frightened faces peering at him through the rear windows of the cabin.
Everything went dark and he felt himself being sucked down, pushed sideways and tumbled head over heels. The tape deck was torn from his grasp.
Hold your breath, he told himself. Don’t panic. Don’t flail around. Kick off your boots. The old lessons drilled into him on research trips to the Hebrides in his Scottish days. Someone had scrawled some helpful advice on the first page of the marine safety book they had to take with them: ‘What do you do if you’re washed overboard? Answer: Never let yourself get into that situation.’
Kemp broke the surface and breathed a lungful of salty air and spray; the sky and sea seemed to have merged into watery darkness. He couldn’t see the Antoine in the murk. The sandbanks had vanished into a mist of spume and spindrift, whipped off the wave tops by the wind.
He kicked off his boots, feeling a ridiculous pang of regret that his recently bought expensive footwear should be abandoned to the ocean. Then he thought of the $10,000 recording machine that even now was heading for the ocean bed, and his boots didn’t seem so important after all. A flash of deeper, darker pain came with the realisation that he was never going to see Sam again, never going to watch her grow up and get married, have children, his grandchildren. He wriggled out of his jacket, fingers tearing at the buttons. Freed up, he began to swim towards where he reckoned the sandbanks had been. Hard rain was calming the sea, smoothing the waves down to three to four feet between trough and foamy crest.
Beside him in the water the head of a seal appeared briefly, and then vanished. Its long, elongated snout gave it an equine appearance and made it easily recognisable as one of the grey species. Seals can ride out any rough weather, but usually in these circumstances they will make for land and haul up.
Ahead in a trough between the waves two more seal heads appeared. Kemp kicked into a looping crawl, throwing his head right back to avoid swallowing too much water. He remembered being told that people drown at sea long before exhaustion sets in followed by the easy slide beneath the waves. They swallow sea water, panic and choke to death.
He was tired, but he felt no cold, probably because the shock had anaesthetised him. The sea was calmer now, and he could see the island shoreline about 800 yards away. The waves weren’t so high now, and a pod of seals broke the surface in a circle around him. Grey seals again, with well-whiskered roman noses, their heads bobbing up and down on the waves. Their two inches of blubber and their waterproof coat of short thick hair made them impervious to cold; they had also made them an attractive prey to man through the millennia. Early man used the oily blubber as fuel for crude lamps, fashioned seal skins into clothing and ate the red, musky flesh. The lamps of Europe and America had been lit with seal and whale blubber for centuries.
No blubber on me, thought Kemp. But he didn’t feel cold as he swam more slowly, conserving energy. The seals’ circle widened until they were about two or three yards distant on either side. They slipped through the water with sinuous, graceful ease. Occasionally surfers had told stories about being bitten by seals, but such cases were very rare, and only when pups had been directly threatened.
Kemp kicked hard to bring his head above the wave line, but there was no sign of the Antoine. He guessed that Buck would have kept heading straight out to sea, to keep his bow into a second wave. The first rule of tsunamis and earthquakes is that there is usually a second one. The rain had eased off and the seals were now close, as close as Kemp had ever been to them in the wild. Long whiskers, sleek skins that looked like wet leather, and those big eyes.
They were making no sounds that were audible to him, but he knew they were communicating with each other, signalling somehow on an agreed destination, or maybe commenting on this strange addition to their pod.
Kemp kicked down, and touched something soft and yielding. He found the bottom with one foot, and then the other. He was on the sandbank. He stood chest deep in the water and took a step forward. Another step, bringing him waist deep now. A few yards ahead the waves were breaking over a
bar of sand. The sea was calming; the rain had eased off.
‘I’ve made it,’ he told himself. ‘I’ve survived.’
Kemp dropped to his knees and breathed in deep lungfuls of air. He looked at his watch. He had been in the water ten minutes. But he felt no cold. The shock will soon wear off, and then I’ll die of exposure, he thought. Where was the Antoine?
About fifteen square yards of sandbar had been uncovered as the waves subsided. He looked shoreward. A fast-flowing channel 300 yards wide lay between him and land. He’d never make it in sodden clothing. He unzipped his trousers and pulled them off.
On the seaward side of the sandbank a dozen seal heads rose and fell in the swell. The seals were now in a semi-circle around the sandbar, paying no attention to the stranger in their midst. Kemp was surrounded by creatures that his species had slaughtered throughout the millennia, yet their presence seemed reassuring, almost welcoming.
He shivered suddenly. The wind was cold, the water warmer. He would be better off in the ocean, maybe. He crawled forward on all fours and slipped into the water, beginning a slow breaststroke towards the ring of grey-whiskered heads that turned as he approached and began to move away from the sandbanks. No longer tired, he swam with ease as the seals around him began to arch and slide through the water like their distant cousins the dolphins. They moved easily though the waves towards their apparent destination, a rocky outcrop on the shoreline about half a mile distant.
Kemp swam with them. He seemed to have no difficulty keeping up, using half breaststroke, half sidestroke. What was happening to him was inexplicable, magical even, but it felt quite natural. Logic deserted him as he accepted the reality that he was at sea, swimming among a pod of seals who seemed to regard him as one of their own.
He had no wish to turn shoreward, or towards the island. Why question something that seemed so natural? If this was the afterlife, or a mad dream world that was a prelude to it, why not accept it?
On the Broken Shore Page 6