ANOTHER VOICE

If you want a look of profound reproach, try bumping into an elephant seal

MATTHEW PARRIS

anic is pointless when you are tremen- dous and have no legs; and an elephant seal does not panic as one approaches, but stares with an expression of vague alarm tempered by sloth. And does nothing, for what is there to do? We are outside his sphere of knowl- edge, perhaps a thirtieth of his weight and probably harmless. His eyes brim. The immense, watery, flat, black, saucer-like eyes of an elephant seal yield a glance at the same time fathomless yet shallow, always swimming with reproach, never quite over- flowing into tears. The encounter with him feels like an intrusion into huge private grief.

Though supine, he will not allow his eyes to leave you now. Whatever he was doing — and it will not have been pressing — is dropped while you are kept under passive surveillance. To move at all is a dreadful bore, but his stare will move and, if neces- sary, his head will follow, swivelling from the neck. And if you circle him too close, he will revolve his whole body after you, like a radius to your circle, keeping you in his sights by pivoting his awkward tons on a centre of gravity somewhere near the mid- dle, and swivelling with urgent little flipper movements and a general wriggle.

He does not like to have to do this. You may be pardoned, though, if you then have the decency to lose interest and resume your journey. Approach closer, however, and he will rouse himself to snarl — snarl, that is, if by snarl we mean a visual snarl: a sudden opening of the enormous jaws, an upward curl of the trunk-tinged upper lip, and the exposure of a shocking expanse of livid pink mouth and yellowed fangs.

But the noise — oh dear — what shall I call the noise? No snarl at all, but a gargan- tuan breaking of wind. You momentarily wonder which end of the seal it is coming from but, though the sound does emerge from the throat, we cannot call it burping. It is deeper, louder, longer — so deep, so long and so loud that from the cabin where I sleep in Port-aux-Francais, on the French sub-Antarctic island of Kerguelen, I can at night hear the seals down on the shore from a mile across the cove.

So I would like to call it a roar but there is no hint of vocal cords or of modulation in the sound. It is, well, a massive and con- trolled belch. He means to deter you, though, being grounded, he has no visible means of attack or even defence. Say you are not scared, then, and come near enough to touch, near enough to catch the stench of what must be the biggest breath problem in discovered space, something steamy, with fish and sulphur and rotten sea- weed, and an indefinable je ne sais quoi to it, too. Even his best friends haven't told him, but then he hasn't told them either. Now you're this close, he'll move away.

And all at once it's sudden. In the par- lance of the textbooks on counselling, your elephant seal has an issue with motivation: he is not a natural self-starter. Start him, hOwever, and he goes, not like a rocket, but a sort of turbo-charged mega-caterpillar. Have you ever seen an elephant seal run- ning? The earth shakes as great rolls of leather-bound blubber go rippling down his 12ft frame and he buckles and unbuckles along the beach. You too would move like this if someone tied your legs together and your hands to your sides and swaddled you in black foam-rubber.

He can reach a human trot for 20 or 30 yards, a good seven miles per hour, regard- less of surface — for earth, concrete, sand, shingle or rocks as big as footballs all feel the same through an elephant seal's hydro-elas- tic, shock-absorbent, fur-on-lard suspension.

But he'll stop unless you pursue. And, as you walk away, he'll swivel round on his flippers to face you, arch himself up for a better view and stare with an expression caught between dismay and horror. No ani- mal, including the human sort, can better demonstrate the word aghast.

I know these things because I have just returned from two days in elephant seal country. The eastern end of this island is completely flat and relatively sheltered from the mad westerly gales which march across the archipelago, and it comprises some 600 square miles of green moss bog, little lakes and channels, rivers and ponds, a carpet of tiny ferns and a weird ground- cover of spiky burrs now turning black for the winter. It is rather like the Norfolk Broads with sub-Antarctic trimmings, and it peers squelchily out into the sea across a sweep of hundreds of long, shallow beaches facing on to the Southern Ocean, breakers far offshore. New Zealand is the next stop, about 3,000 miles away. The whole peninsula is perfect for elephant seals and penguins.

But the penguins have mostly departed to winter and gorge in the sea. So have the biggest bull and cow elephant seals, who will return fat, to fight, mate and burp in the southern spring. These are the biggest seals in the world, some of more than five tons weight. Back on shore their offspring wait, still only a ton or two, the little dar- lings cuddling, jousting and, mostly, snoozing.

The seals don't restrict themselves to the shoreline, but lollop up to the marshes or luxuriate on inland banks of dead seaweed driven up by the storm. If you went walking here after dark — walking anywhere — you would trip over a seal within yards; and the night is filled with basso profundo burps. The purpose of our trip was to collect sacks of the jewel-like, translucent round stones, amber, milk-white, green and blue, that wash down from the hills to these shores, but I spent hours standing quite still, just observing seals.

They are astonishingly ill-natured and utterly gregarious, hating each other and copying each other, like penguins or New Labour. Cow seals lie in huge steaming heaps, half a dozen at a time, often on top of or across each other. Young males cud- dle up, scratching idly with spare flippers, then, burping and grunting, pick fights and begin the violent jousting which, in time, when the possession of cow-harems is in dispute, will be for real. Two males burp rudely at each other for a while, then rear up in two arched bows, mermaid-like tail-flippers at one end, bared fangs at the other, rocking against each other like opposed rocking-chairs and thumping necks together, trying to pierce the thick hide with their teeth. There is blood, even in this play. Then they cuddle again, and sleep.

I toured the coast on a tractor. Nothing can be driven inland (too many lakes and marshes) but a tractor can ford the river inlets at low tide and plough along the sand and shingle beaches, There is no road but the ghost of a track. And here the seals love to lie, insurmountable road humps.

Sheep and pheasant may dive into your path but will at least dive out of it again. Seals just stay there. Tractor stops. Seal burps. Tractor revs. Seal snarls. Tractor hoots. Wheels inch forward until rubber touches blubber. Seal swivels and dives, snarling, down the bank, then swivels, back- ing a little on his flippers, and stares as you pass, aghast.