By this particular day, the elephant seal had been in the rock pool at Cape Palliser for a few days. He had become, if not normal, then at least part of the furniture, in the daily arrangement of the rock pools. The fur seal adults kept their distance. The pups crept closer than was possibly wise. He slept, snored, floated, gaped, and watched the world with the heavy-lidded, weary expression of an animal who was waiting for yet another tourist or seal pup to interrupt his napping.
I had got used to looking for him.
That was part of the rhythm. Arrive. Scan the rocks. Check the shallows. Look for the huge grey shape that was somehow both impossible to miss and very good at getting lost in the landscape.
Today, he was in the water. The deeper end of the rock pool. The fur seals quietly moved to the smaller pools, leaving him almost alone in the water.
At first, he was playing with some large pieces of wood. But then I couldn’t see them any more and there was something else there.
He was moving slowly through the rock pool, pushing it ahead of him with his nose. It was small and dark, and in the water it looked like driftwood. The Cape Palliser rock pools are full of things moved around by weather and tide, so for a while, that was all I thought it was.
Then I realised. It wasn’t wood. It was a fur seal pup. Dead.
I don’t know whether the pup had already died. I don’t know how it ended up in the water. I didn’t see the elephant seal kill it, and I don’t want to make the story more dramatic than it is.
What I saw was what happened then.
For about ninety minutes, I watched the elephant seal move around the rock pool with the pup’s body near him. Sometimes it floated in front of him. Sometimes beside him. Sometimes against him. Sometimes he nudged it with his nose and it drifted away, then came back with the movement of the water.
He didn’t eat it. He didn’t tear at it. He didn’t thrash or maul or throw it around.
There was no clear story. No obvious intent. He moved through the water with this small dark body, and I watched because I couldn’t stop watching.
The photographs are, for me, distressing and unsettling because nothing much is happening.
There is no hunting. No struggle. No spectacle. No menace.
Just an elephant seal interacting with a dead pup in a rock pool. In a way I couldn’t understand.
I kept photographing, though I wasn’t entirely comfortable doing it. The privilege of witnessing something you don’t understand becomes tangled with the discomfort of what it is you’re witnessing. The camera gave me a reason to stay present and not think too much, but it didn’t make the moment easier to deal with.
The day before, and the day after, he was a snoring boulder. A badly parked car with teeth. A huge gatecrasher being investigated by pups with more curiosity than judgement.
Today, not so much.