They were fascinated by the thought that I should have come all the way from England just to catch and film bichos, and doubtless thought I was more than a little mad, though they were far too well-mannered to say so. On the subject of elephant seals and fur seals they were very informative and helpful. The elephant seals, they explained, had now had their babies and reared them. This meant that they were no longer to be found in one spot on the beach near the fur seals, which acted, as it were, as their maternity ward. Now they drifted up and down the coast as the mood took them, and were difficult to find, though there were two or three places which they were particularly fond of where they might be located. These favourite haunts were called, charmingly enough, the elefanterías. The peons marked on the map the areas in which the elefanterías were to be found, and then they showed me where the biggest concentration of fur seals lived. These, they said, would be easy, for they still had young, and were therefore packed on the beach and easily accessible. Moreover, the peons went on, there was a good camping area just near the fur seal colony, a flat grassy space, sheltered from the wind on all sides by a gentle rise in the ground. Cheered by this news we drank more wine, ate large quantities of roast sheep, and then clambered into the Land-Rover again and set off to look for the camp site.
We found it without too much difficulty, and it was as good as the peons had promised, a small, level plain covered with coarse grass and occasional clumps of small, twisted dead bushes. On three sides it was protected by a curving rim of low hills, covered in yellow bushes, and on the third side a high wall of shingle lay between it and the sea. This offered us some cover, but even so there was a strong and persistent wind blowing from the sea, and now that it was evening it became very cold. It was decided that the three female members of the party would sleep inside the Land-Rover, while I slept under it. Then we dug a hole, collected dry brushwood and built a fire to make tea. One had to be very careful about the fire, for we were surrounded by acres and acres of tinder-dry undergrowth, and the strong wind would, if you were not careful, lift your whole fire up into the air and dump it down among the bushes. I dreaded to think what the ensuing conflagration would be like.
The sun set in a nest of pink, scarlet and black clouds, and there was a brief green twilight. Then it darkened, and a huge yellow moon appeared and gazed down at us as we crouched around the fire, huddled in all the clothes we could put on, for the wind was now bitter. Presently the Land-Rover party crept inside the vehicle, with much grunting and argument as to whose feet should go where, and I collected my three blankets, put earth on the fire, and then fashioned myself a bed under the back axle of the Land-Rover. In spite of the fact that I was wearing three pullovers, two pairs of trousers, a duffel-coat and a woolly hat, and had three blankets wrapped round me, I was still cold, and as I shivered my way into a half-sleep I made a mental note that on the morrow I would reorganize our sleeping arrangements.
I awoke in that dimly lit silence just before dawn, when even the sound of the sea seems to have hushed. The wind had switched direction in the night, and the wheels of the Land-Rover now offered no protection at all. The hills around were black against the blue-green of the dawn sky, and there was no sound except the hiss of the wind and the faint snore of the surf. I lay there, shuddering in my cocoon of clothes and blankets, and debated whether or not I should get up and light the fire and make some tea. Cold though I was under my clothes, it was still a few degrees warmer than wandering about collecting brushwood, and so I decided to stay where I was. I was just trying to insinuate my hand into my duffel-coat pocket for my cigarettes, without letting a howling wind into my cocoon of semi-warmth, when I realized that we had a visitor.
Suddenly a guanaco stood before me, as if conjured out of nothing. He stood some twenty feet away, quite still, surveyed me with a look of surprise and displeasure, his neat ears twitching back and forth. He turned his head, sniffing the breeze, and I could see his profile against the sky. He wore the supercilious expression of his race, the faint aristocratic sneer, as if he knew that I had slept in my clothes for the past three nights. He lifted one forefoot daintily, and peered down at me closely. Whether, at that moment, the breeze carried my scent to him I don’t know, but he suddenly stiffened and, after a pause for meditation, he belched.
It was not an accidental gurk, the minute breach of good manners that we are all liable to at times. This was a premeditated, rich and prolonged belch, with all the fervour of the Orient in it. He paused for a moment, glaring at me, to make sure that his comment on my worth had made me feel properly humble, and then he turned and disappeared as suddenly as he had come, and I could hear the faint whisper of his legs brushing through the little bushes. I waited for a time to see if he would come back, but he had obviously gone about his business, so I lit my cigarette and lay shivering and smoking until the sun came up.
Once we had breakfasted and everyone was more or less conscious, we unhitched the trailer, removed all our equipment from inside the Land-Rover and piled it on the ground under tarpaulins, checked the camera equipment, made sandwiches and coffee, and then set off to look for the fur seals. The peons had told us that if we drove half a mile or so down the track and then branched off, across country, towards the sea, we should easily find the colony. What they had not told us, of course, was that driving across country was a nerve- and spine-shattering experience, for the ground was corrugated and pitted in the most extraordinary way, and most of these death-traps were concealed by the bushes, so you would crash into them before you knew they were there, while the bushes screeched along the sides of the Land-Rover in what sounded like an ecstasy of shrill, maniacal laughter. At last I decided that, unless we wanted a broken spring or puncture, we had better continue the hunt on foot, so, finding a more or less level piece of country I parked the Land-Rover and we got out. At once I became aware of a strange sound, like the frenzied roar of a football crowd heard distantly. We walked through waist-high golden scrub until we came out on the edge of a small cliff, and there on the shingle beach below us, at the edge of the creaming waves, lay the fur seal colony.
As we reached this vantage point the noise of the animals smote us, roar, bleat, gurgle and cough, a constant undulation of sound, like the boiling of an enormous cauldron of porridge. The colony, consisting of about seven hundred animals, lay strung out along the beach in a line some ten or twelve deep, and so tightly packed together that, as they shifted and moved in the sun, they gleamed gold, like a restless swarm of bees. Forgetting all about filming I just squatted on the edge of the cliff, staring down at this wonderful collection of animals, completely entranced.
At first we found – as we had done with the penguin colony – that there was so much going on, so much confusion and noise, that you were bewildered, and your eyes were moving constantly up and down this immense moving plate of animals in an effort to catch and translate every movement, until you began to feel dizzy. But, after the first hour, when the shock of seeing such a magnificent mass of animals at close range had worn off somewhat, you found you could concentrate.
It was the adult bulls that first caught and held your attention, for they were so massive. They were quite the most proud and extraordinary-looking animals I have ever seen. They sat with their faces pointed skywards, their shaggy necks bent back so that the fat was scalloped into folds, their snub-noses and fat beery faces peering up into the sky with all the pompous arrogance of the Tenniel illustration of Humpty Dumpty. They had physiques like boxers, the tremendous muscular shoulders tapering down to slender hindquarters, and ending, incongruously, in a pair of limbs that were quite ridiculous. The feet had long slender fingers, carefully webbed, so the impression was that the seal was wearing, for some reason best known to himself, a pair of very elegant frogmen’s flippers. Sometimes you would see one old bull stretched out asleep in the sand, blubbering and snoring to himself, while at the end of his body he would be waving his large flippers to and fro, pointing the slender fingers wi
th all the grace and delicacy of a Balinese dancer. When they walked these huge frog-like feet stuck out on either side, and, as the motion of the animal’s body was very like a rumba, the effect was extremely funny. Their colouring ranged from chocolate to a rich biscuit brown, fading to russet on the shaggy fur round their shoulders and necks. This made a nice contrast to the wives who were very much smaller and decked out in silver or golden coats. Whereas their husbands were enormous blundering tanks of animals, the wives were slim, sinuous and sexy, with their neat pointed faces and big melting eyes. They were the personification of femininity, graceful to a degree, beautiful, coquettish and at the same time loving. They were heavenly creatures, and I decided that should I ever have the chance of being an animal in this world I would choose to be a fur seal so that I might enjoy having such a wonderful wife.
Although they had some six miles of beach to use, the colony chose to lie in a tight conglomeration, covering an area about a quarter of a mile in length. It seemed to me that if they had spaced themselves out a bit more they would have halved the troubles of the colony, for, packed tightly like this, each bull was in a constant state of nerves over his little group of wives, and throughout the colony there were fights breaking out all the time. A lot of the blame for these, I am afraid, was due to the females who – as soon as they thought their husband was not watching – would undulate gracefully across the sand towards the next group, and sit there watching the bull with languishing eyes. It would take a very staunch Presbyterian fur seal to resist the appeal of those pleading melting eyes. But before any infidelity could take place the husband would suddenly make a rapid count and discover that he was a wife short. As soon as he spotted her, he would surge after her, his enormous bulk scattering the shingle like spray, and from his mouth, with its great white fangs, would issue a prolonged, lion-like belching roar. Reaching her he would catch her by the scruff of the neck and shake her savagely from side to side. Then, with a jerk of his head, he would send her spinning across the sand towards his harem.
By this time the other bull would have worked himself into a state of nerves. He would feel that the husband was too close to his wives for safety, and so he would lunge forward with open mouth, uttering fearsome gurgling cries, and the two would join in battle. Most of these fights were merely mock combats, and after a good deal of mouth-opening, roaring, and lunging, honour would be satisfied. But occasionally both bulls would lose their tempers, and then it was incredible and frightening to watch how two such ponderous and dropsical-looking creatures could turn into such swift, deft and deadly fighters. The shingle would be churned up as the two colossal creatures snapped and barged at each other’s fat necks, and the blood spurted out over the fascinated audience of wives and babies. One of the favourite gambits during these fights was to undulate across the shingle towards your opponent, waving your head from side to side, like a boxer feinting. Then, when you got near enough you would lunge forward and, with a sideways and downwards bite, try and slash open the thick hide of your antagonist’s neck. Most of the old bulls on the beach had fresh wounds or white scars decorating their necks, and one I saw looked as though someone had slashed him with a sabre, for the wound was some eighteen inches long and appeared to be about six inches deep.
When a bull waddled back to his wives after such a battle they would gather round him in admiration and love, elongating their sinuous necks so that they could reach up and nuzzle and kiss his face, rubbing their gold and silver bodies against his barrel chest, while he stared up into the sky arrogantly, occasionally condescending to bend his head and bite one of his wives gently on the neck.
A lot of the nervous tension that the bulls with wives suffered from, and a lot of the actual fighting, was due to the bachelor bulls. These were gay young bulls, much slimmer and less muscular than the old ones, who had been unable to acquire a wife or wives for themselves at the beginning of the breeding season when the courtship battles take place. These young bulls spent most of their time just sleeping in the sun, or swimming about in the shallow water at the sea’s edge. But, every now and then, they would be smitten with an impish desire to irritate their elders and betters. They would swagger slowly along the colony, their great frog’s feet stuck out, gazing about them with a benign air of innocence, as though there was not an evil thought in their heads. Then, as they passed a family group in the centre of which squatted an old bull star-gazing, the young bachelor would suddenly swerve and break into an undulating run, getting faster and faster as he approached the group. The females would scatter wildly as he burst through their circle, he would hurl himself at the old bull, give him a quick bite on the neck, and then undulate rapidly away before the old bull really knew what was happening. Then, with a roar of rage the old bull would give chase, but by then the gay bachelor had reached the sea and plunged in, so the old bull, grumbling to himself, would return to round up his scattered wives, and settle himself in their midst for another period of astronomical research.
The ones that seemed to lead the most carefree and pleasant lives were the young, but fully adult bulls, who had only succeeded in getting themselves one wife. They generally lay a little apart from the main colony, their wife and cub alongside them, and spent a lot of time sleeping. They could afford to do this, as it was obviously easier to control one of these high-spirited female seals than to try and cope with the vagaries of six or seven. It was with one of these young newlywed couples that I was lucky enough to see the consummation of their marriage, as it were, and I have never seen such a delicate and beautiful piece of love-play between two animals.
The young bull had dug himself the fur seal equivalent of a honeymoon cottage in the shingle near the base of the cliff from which I was filming. This cottage consisted of a large, deep hole scraped out with his fore-flippers, so that the top layer of sun-heated shingle was scraped off, and the cool damp shingle beneath was exposed. He lay in this hole with his wife in a very typical attitude, his great head resting on her back as she lay asleep, at right-angles to him. They had lain like this, almost unmoving, for the whole morning. Now, at mid-day with the fierce sun directly overhead, they began to get restless. The bull started to wave his hind flipper to and fro in the air, shift his bulk about uneasily, and scoop great flippersful of damp shingle and shovel them on to his back, in an effort to keep cool. His wife, disturbed by his movements, woke up, looked about her, yawned widely, and then lay down again with a deep, contented sigh, gazing around placidly with her great, dark eyes. After a few minutes’ contemplation she shifted her body round so that she was lying parallel to the bull, thus depriving him of his head-rest. He gave a low grunt of annoyance at this, and heaving up his bulk he flopped down on top of her back, so that she was half-hidden by his body. Then he closed his eyes and prepared for sleep. But his wife, with her spouse’s great bulk half-covering her, had other ideas. She wriggled sideways so that the bull’s barrel-shaped body slipped off her back and settled into the shingle with a scrunch. Then she leant forward and started to bite at his mouth and chin, very delicately, and in a slow and languorous manner. The bull kept his eyes tightly shut, and put up with these caresses, only occasionally snorting as if he were very embarrassed. But at last the female’s love-play seduced him, and he opened his eyes and started to bite at the back of her glossy neck. With these signs of affection from her lord the female became as excited as a puppy, rolling and wriggling under his great head as he bit her, nibbling at his pigeon-chest and uttering subdued ‘woofing’ noises through her nose, so that her long whiskers stood out like fans of spun glass round her neat muzzle. As she writhed on the shingle he bent his head and delicately sniffed at her hindquarters, like some bloated old gourmet savouring the bouquet of a rare brandy. Then he hauled himself slowly and ponderously on top of her and entered her. Now she was straining up her face to his so that their whiskers entwined, biting his muzzle, his nose and his throat, and he in his turn engulfed her neck or her throat in savagely restrained bites. Their
hindquarters undulated together, not quickly, urgently and crudely as in most animals, but slowly and carefully, the movements as smooth and precise as honey pouring from a jar. Presently, closely entwined, they reached their shuddering climax and then relaxed. The bull hauled himself off his wife and flopped down beside her, where they lay gently nibbling one another’s mouths and faces with a tenderness that was remarkable. The whole act had been beautiful to watch, and was a lesson in restrained love-making which a lot of human beings would do well to emulate.
I have not as yet mentioned the fur seal pups which were such an important and amusing part of the colony. There were hundreds of them, and they moved continuously through the mass of sleeping, love-making, bickering adults, looking like animated black ink-blots. They would lie sleeping on the shingle in the most extraordinary abandoned attitudes, as though they were really balloon animals that had suddenly been half-deflated. Then, suddenly, one would wake up and discover that its mother was not there, and it would hoist itself on to its flippers and move sturdily down the beach, employing the strange rumba-like movement of the adult seal. Planting its flippers in the shingle with great determination, it would pause every few yards to open wide its pink mouth and bleat forlornly, like a lamb. Then, after it had wandered some distance in search of its parents, its bravado and strength would desert it, and it would give one more despairing bleat and then flop down on its tummy and sink almost immediately into a deep and refreshing sleep.
The Whispering Land Page 6