The Life of a Seal

A dead seal got washed up on East Beach today. It was large enough that you could mistake it for a pig at first. White, its skin gone – rigor mortis? Flayed? I could not remember the word for people who skin seals, if there is one, and put it into the search engine. I got back links to the selkies, those strange shapeshifting bodies of lore which are seal in the water and human on land.

This body did not manage the transformation.

It had survived to adulthood, measuring over a metre from head to toe. The head appeared to be missing, or at least had no eyes. It lay prone, its feet facing downward, their smallness almost comical except that there was no time for comedy here, not with the bloated white corpse flecked with East Beach seaweed.

Hours later when I came back from a meeting it was still there, its whiteness glowing in the backwash of a streetlight as night had fallen. East Beach is a slip of concrete sloping into the sea, its lower reaches covered in a bed of seaweed upon which the seal rested. There was also a rain garden, a municipal experiment to filter runoff through plants. Over the past few months rain had been dismally copious; the garden was thriving.

Poor seal. It deserved better than to be a writing prompt.

The meeting was a candidate launch for the general election at the end of the month. Since I am a member of the local Green Party, discussion naturally turned to the seal and how it had got there. I imagined it beginning its life somewhere in the Shetlands, or Scandinavia, or maybe some long inlet in Norway. I used to see seals when I was on the train, passing on the viaduct approaching Fota island. A family of them would gather on the swamp when the tide went out.

Perhaps it escaped the seal skinners in Greenland and met its end from natural causes. I like to think that it did, and that its body was brought on the Gulf Stream and the currents to the south coast of Ireland, specifically to Cork. Passing the places we only hear about on the shipping forecast: Rockall, Bloody Foreland, Valentia Island. An older time, when lighthouses flashed in Morse code.

But I cannot be too fanciful. This death is recent. This seal was not floating for years.

But I believe it made a journey, unencumbered by human behaviour. It sat on rocks far from here and snickered with joy. It mated and danced in the sea with its partner. It dived for fish and caught the occasional mackerel the Norwegians didn’t manage to scoop up before it ever reached southern coasts.

There were no marks, cuts or signs of fishing tackle. The people who run the dead seal portal have been alerted, and hopefully they will find out more about its journey; and yet I believe this magnificent animal died of old age after living the full span of its life. That’s my hope in any case.