A Drop in the Ocean. Jenni Ogden
he’s the father, and that’ll break up his marriage and stuff up his kids, so I’ve decided to count my blessings. The main one is that I never have to see the bastard again.”
FINALLY. ONE NIGHT I SAW TOM ON THE BEACH AND plucked up the courage to ask him if I could help.
“Sure, that would be good,” he said, just like that.
Why didn’t I ask him sooner?
I spent the rest of the turtle watch with him as he explained how to record the tag number if the turtle was already tagged, measure the carapace—the proper name for the shell—and note any damage to it or the flippers, and mark it on the turtle outline on the data sheet. About half the turtles were untagged, and fitting the nasty metal tags into the pinchers and maneuvering them over the edge of the turtle’s front left flipper without disturbing her laying was surprisingly easy, but squeezing the pinchers shut so that the sharp points of the tag pierced the flipper and locked together took quite a lot of strength and both hands, and I thought it must hurt her. I winced every time, feeling it biting through.
My third turtle had completed her egg laying and had almost finished filling in her pit when we came upon her high up on the beach under the trees. She had no tag and Tom told me to tag her quickly and try and measure her before she began her journey back to the sea. She ignored me until I managed to get the tag over her flailing flipper—by then I was covered in sand from her efforts—but as I squeezed the pinchers shut, she turned, reared up on all four flippers, and almost ran down the sand to the sea with me running—almost dragged—along beside her. All at once the beach was littered with dead branches with sharp bits. As she reached the water’s edge and with a loud sigh slithered into her own world, I at last managed to pull the pinchers from her flipper, hopefully leaving the tag firmly attached. I ended up on my butt in the shallows as she glided out over the reef flats. And there I sat, catching my breath, until Tom appeared beside me, laughing his head off.
“Good one, Anna. Did you get the tag number down?”
“Oh, shit.”
“Well, I suppose you remember it?”
“Very funny. Sorry. What will happen now? You’ll have no record of her next time she comes up.”
“Luckily for you, I wrote it down on the form when I gave you the tag.”
I was on my feet by now, my shorts clinging to my scratched legs and dripping onto the sand. “I’ll tag you if you don’t wipe that satisfied grin off your face.” I thrust the pinchers at him and he caught my wrist, still grinning his Cheshire grin.
“The lady has balls after all,” he said. “Welcome to the team.”
The next night, and every night after that, I did my turtle patrol alone. Kitted out with a head torch and my very own wide leather paraphernalia belt, and clutching my clipboard with the data forms, I took on the stretch of beach from the wharf to just past the campground, while Bill, Ben and Tom did the rest of the beach. Sometimes I was joined by a couple of the campers, and as the owners of the few holiday houses on the island arrived, kids would silently appear to watch the show. I didn’t mind the company as long as I got some time alone. When the last turtle on my stretch had returned to the sea with the outgoing tide, I went back to my cabin. Sometimes it was still dark and sometimes it was dawn, but it always took a while to fall asleep in the unbearably hot room, the pillow over my head to muffle the whooo-hooos of thousands of ghost shearwaters.
When I woke, I’d be famished, and more often than not had a massive breakfast. In the afternoon I would walk across the island to Tom’s place to hand in my completed data forms and get more tags if I needed them. Sometimes he was there and sometimes he wasn’t. But when he was I usually stayed a while. We talked mainly about turtles—Tom’s knowledge of the research literature was impressive—but apart from discovering that Tom was thirty-nine, came from Sydney, where his parents still lived, and had a younger married sister with two kids who lived in Melbourne, I found out nothing about him. He was about as forthcoming about his past life as I was.
CHRISTMAS LOOMED, AND IT WAS GETTING HOTTER BY the day. Official temperatures hovered around 32 degrees, but it was a bloody sight hotter in the sun, and nights were steamy and sticky. With a sea almost as warm as the air, I no longer bothered with Pat’s wetsuit when I went snorkeling. I was becoming an expert at identifying the small fish in the lagoon, although the cryptic patterns of the different varieties of black-striped yellow butterfly fish continued to defeat my visuospatial memory powers.
The Pisonia trees with their sticky buds were loaded with twiggy nests full of seriously cute baby noddy terns, all squawking endlessly for more food. The trees could be deadly if the adult bird misjudged its landing spot and became ensnared by the sticky buds. One day I rescued a stuck-up bird flailing about on the ground, and it was a slow and painstaking process pulling the jellybean-sized seeds off its feathers, one by one. But I was rewarded when the bird, finally seed-free, balanced on its webbed feet, shook out its ruffled feathers, and flew unsteadily up into a tree. When a baby fell out of its crowded nest there was nothing to be done; as far as I could see, the parents never came for it.
Underfoot the shearwaters waddled about, not so many during the day, but thousands returning from sea each evening. I’d sit on the beach with my glass of wine, sometimes alone, sometimes with Tom or Pat, and great flocks of birds would darken the pink evening sky as they silently soared and wheeled in ever lower circles, the kings of the air. Then they would plummet clumsily to the ground, running along the sand for a meter or two before skidding to a stop near their burrow. After greeting their mates, stuck there on incubation duty, they would hang around in groups discussing their day, ignoring the people walking past.
On the reef flats there were many waders, including the lanky and elegant herons, some white and others blue-gray. Once, when we were sitting quietly on the beach, Tom pointed to a dot far out over the reef, and as it came closer I could see it was a large bird of prey. It landed high in the feathery branches of a Casuarina tree, no more than ten meters from us—a white-breasted sea eagle, with a five-foot wingspan and deeply hooked bill.
Violet and Bill had one of their barbecues on Christmas Eve, and this time I had no second thoughts about joining the party. Everyone brought some food as well as alcohol, and by midnight we were all fairly happy. High tide was at one in the morning, and Tom, Ben, and I staggered off to do the turtle count. It was five before my last turtle returned to the sea, just making it before the coral was too exposed for her to swim safely back to the deep. I counted twenty-eight laying turtles on my patch during that watch, and eighteen of them had to be tagged. It was a struggle in my slightly woozy state, but as the dawn broke, I collapsed on the sand, fizzing with the pure joy of it. I raised an imaginary glass to my long-gone research assistants, hopefully now happily working for a better boss than I. “Here’s to you,” I sang into the cooling salt breeze. “I finally understand what it’s all about.”
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