[story] the boy who talked to seals
author: chris (aefallen)
email: edgeofdawn [at] gmail.com
Every morning the selkie woke (cursing the dawn), untangled himself from his sheets (cursing legs), climbed out of bed (cursing the necessity of human inventions), went to the bathroom and its cold floor (cursing feet, and very much missing flippers), and brushed his teeth while staring at his all-too human reflection in the mirror (God, when had he gotten that old?).
Then he shoved the hair out of his eyes, gritted his teeth and went down the stairs to have breakfast with the boy who had Captured him.
The selkie knew without a doubt that there were things more humiliating than being Captured (at his age!) by a boy who seemed to be barely out of his adolescence, but if there were, they had not happened to him yet.
Captivity had not robbed him of his ability to appreciate the fact that it was a beautiful day. The sun poured in through the window and trailed sparkling fingers through the pool beneath it, within which the run-down aquarium’s only aquatic inhabitants (two (actual) seals and one sea-lion) were positively frolicking.
The selkie would have glared at them if the glares had the desired effect (they mostly seemed to read his glares as Play? Now? and reacted accordingly with a great deal of unseemly enthusiasm).
Sometimes the selkie wondered if they knew they were prisoners, too.
The selkie could have cheerfully suffered (and had indeed suffered) many indignities, but the one he found hardest to swallow was being held captive by a goddamned human boy (and the victim of a particularly bad self-inflicted haircut at that).
Getting into this mess had been simple, as easy and as stupid as tangling oneself in fishing nets. He had been careless, and he had been a fool, and if he ever got his pelt back he was never going human again. Ever.
He had hauled out in a cave one night, and in his carelessness he had failed to realise that the cave had been inhabited by a boy armed with what the selkie learned later was a tranquiliser gun. He did, however, work it out for himself once he had awoken from a simple sting in his side to find himself distinctly peltless and comprehensively taken captive. He had not been restrained in any form as the sedative had rendered restraints unnecessary.
This was not how it was supposed to happen. None of the tales were anything like this, and the selkie cursed ever dismissing the old stories as Things That Only Happened to Stupid Selkies (who thought that dancing naked on rocks was an excellent idea when humans were in the vicinity), because he had assumed he wasn’t one, when really, this entire debacle only illustrated how eminently qualified he was for the title. (If he ever got back to his colony those tales were getting an overhaul and a complete retelling. As It Could Happen to You, Too.)
He had come to with an awful headache, a persistent and disturbing lassitude to his thoughts and movements, and worst of all, still human.
There had been someone leaning over him, and that someone had been talking nothing but unintelligible nonsense. It was only after the unintelligible nonsense had been repeated some ten times did the selkie realise his captor was attempting to speak extremely butchered Irish. (The selkie was not fluent in Irish, but a section of his colony would speak nothing but, and he had enough of a rough idea of the language to know when someone was trying to speak it to him.)
Soon the selkie could soon bear no more.
“Stop it,” said the selkie, eventually, “Your Irish is even worse than your manners. I can speak English, if you will stop trying to strip me of my sanity by mutilating the language.”
His captor had presented him with a deal forthwith, one that was simple, logical and in the circumstances, utterly ironic. There were three seals (two seals and one sea-lion, actually) in his charge who needed to be returned to the wild, and the selkie's assistance would be instrumental in ensuring their rehabilitation. Once the seals were able to fend for themselves, his pelt would be returned.
“Look, I don’t want you captive any more than you do,” his captor had the gall to say.
“Your lies are worse than your Irish,” said the selkie.
His captor had cocked his head to one side, and the selkie noticed for the first time, though the sedative haze, that his captor was really very young. “You know, being nasty to me isn’t going to get you free any sooner.”
“Being nice to you isn’t going to get me free any sooner either,” said the selkie.
On the first day (though technically the second, the selkie supposed, counting the day of capture itself) of his captivity, the boy had taken him to meet the seals, which were housed in a massive pool that connected directly to the sea. The seal pool was separated from the open ocean by means of a tall wire-mesh sea-gate, and it was the key feature of the aquarium complex which had become the selkie's new world.
As they approached the pool, the selkie noted that the entire aquarium was built next to the sea, and indeed hugged the coastline on its northmost side. He also noticed that he and the boy appeared to be the only people (in a manner of speaking) present in the entire complex, and also that the entire complex, save the seal pool, appeared to have fallen into rather advanced stages of disrepair.
The seal pool was, the selkie admitted, fairly generous and certainly more than big enough for the two seals and one sea-lion it was currently housing.
The boy seemed to have expected the selkie to commence working with them immediately, and was surprised when the selkie refused.
"I need to watch you with them first," the selkie explained, irritated at the need for words (seals never needed them, which was one of the reasons he preferred being one). “I have to see what bad habits you've taught them.”
He watched the boy approach the seals and groaned inwardly as one of the seals did a perfect backflip and came paddling up to the boy. Rehabilitation, if at all possible, was going to be an uphill task, and the selkie was too damned old for this business. If the seals had already settled into human-pleasing behaviours, adapting to the wild was going to be difficult.
The selkie watched as all the seals reacted to the boy's appearance as if he was the best thing since fresh fish. The sea lion swam across the pool to get to him, one of the seals gently butted his hand with its head (the selkie had not witnessed a more blatant show of Pet me! demonstrated by any seal over a year old), and the backflipping seal was positively beside itself with happiness.
Given the circumstances of his capture, the selkie had not been prepared to notice that it was fairly obvious, from watching the boy interact with the seals, that they loved him, and he them.
Rehabilitation was going to be harder than the selkie had initially thought.
"They're rescues, aren't they," he said to the boy, as he approached the pool.
"Yes, " said the boy, instinctively touching the seal nearest to him (who leaned into his touch - this would simply have to stop, human contact was not a thing that was often available to, or necessarily safe for, seals in the wild) as if to reassure it. "Can I ask how you knew?"
It had been no great leap of deduction. None of the seals had been particularly attractive, and the sea lion had had a massive scar, white with age, reaching from his eye to his tail. The selkie knew that no seal in the wild would have been able to survive damage like that without outside assistance. The selkie said as much, and then he steeled himself and said, "Are you certain that release is the best option? If you've had them for a while, they may not be able to survive the ocean."
"I don't think they have much of a choice," the boy said wryly, giving the selkie a sideways glance. "This place is going to be foreclosed in two months. No aquarium or zoo I asked will have them, and I'm not sending them to a performance centre - not that any such place will have them, either. The nearest seal conservation effort is a seal-tagging centre two hours down the coast, and while they monitor, they don't rehabilitate."
"There is a rehabilitation centre half a day's swim down the coast," said the selkie. "It's quiet and keeps to itself, which is why you may not have heard of it." The selkie's mother had been rescued there as a pup separated from her pod, but the boy didn't need to know that.
"I know," says the boy, looking surprised that the selkie knew. "But it's strapped for resources and for the moment can't take in any more seals that have to be rehabilitated from scratch. If I can get mine hunting for themselves and able to stay out in the ocean, they can keep an eye on them for me."
"You realise it's not quite fair to pull me into these problems of yours," said the selkie.
The boy ducked his head. "Yes," he says. "I know."
Being of a distinctly pragmatic bent and finding despair an exhausting emotion, the selkie was not given to bouts of misery with respect to his current state. He soon realised that other than the issue of the pelt, the boy was not cruel, which was a good thing. He was, however, an occasional idiot as in regard to his seals, which to the selkie bordered on cruelty by way of ignorance.
“Would you eat that?” the selkie asked, on the second day, watching the boy pour a ghastly mess of broken fish and fish heads before his sea lions, who looked at each other and then at their dinner mournfully, before performing a very human shrug and commencing to eat (in lieu of anything more palatable making its appearance).
“They don’t seem to mind,” his captor says.
“That’s because they know they’re getting nothing else to eat if they don’t eat that,” retorts the selkie.
“Fish are hardly cheap, you know,” says the boy.
The selkie rolls his eyes (this, he was delighted to learn, required no extra practice).
Life as a captive had not been what the selkie had been expecting (having prepared himself for the worst the moment the sedative had worn off). The selkie had inherited his pragmatic bent from his equally pragmatic mother, who had brought her pups up with an appreciation of the fact that Capture was a known phenomenon, and that it was eight times as likely to happen to a selkie in seal form than it was to a selkie caught Changing. Her pups had been taught basic survival skills suitable for both forms - indeed, being able to leave the colony had been contingent on a test that was, essentially, surviving the human world as a human, without reverting to seal form, for two months. This had been a particularly harsh test that caused some controversy within the selkie colony, as this test essentially simulated Capture, up to the element of surprise. The test, and preparation for it, was how the young selkies had been taught and learnt to practice essential skills such as communicating, obtaining assistance, cooking, and being able to withstand Capture.
In all ways but the most important one, the boy let the selkie have his freedom. The selkie could go where he wished within the compound and do what he wished in the time that did not belong to seal rehabilitation. His captor's company was never forced upon him for longer than necessary, namely, for the length of time it took to communicate how the seals were doing, how progress was, and what needed to be done. This was normally done at breakfast and again at dinner.
The selkie had his own room, and while there were no locks on the doors, the selkie never needed them. The boy never entered his room nor expressed any intention to do so. The selkie could swim if he wished and sleep when (and indeed where) he wished and help himself to the human food in the odd boxes and bright tins and in the tall cold box that was nearly as tall as the selkie himself.
The gates to the aquarium complex were not in fact ever locked. They led out to the small and somewhat sleepy town that hosted the aquarium. Padlocks were in place, but they were never actually shut, which the selkie felt was an odd practice, and certainly not secure. He had asked the boy as much, to which the boy had said that there was nothing worth stealing in the aquarium complex, and that the selkie's pelt was not stored within the complex, at any rate.
The boy had never in fact said that the selkie could not leave if he wished, but the both of them knew that the selkie would not leave as long as the boy had the selkie’s pelt in his keeping. The selkie’s very existence was a prison without bars; being human, his body was a cage all its own.
The selkie endured three days of the boy's awful cooking before he had enough. (The boy had, on the first day, offered him the same raw fish he had given the seals, and the selkie had given him such a dirty look that the boy had actually backed off. The selkie had never been offered anything but human food thereafter.)
On the fourth day, when the boy wandered into the kitchen around mid-day, he followed and demanded that all cooking utensils be surrendered to him, and knowledge of the workings of the Stove be imparted to him also.
“It is bad enough being trapped, but I refuse to be poisoned also,” said the selkie, vehemently. “Your skills in the kitchen are clearly why we say your kind kill their fish twice: once when they capture it, and once again when they cook it.”
The boy's eyes went wide with incredulity. “Where would you learn to cook?”
“Not all of us spend all our lives in the ocean, you realise,” said the selkie scathingly. “Really, for someone who’s caught a selkie, you don’t seem to know anything about us. Now get out before your presence ruins the food.”
Cooking isn’t easy, of course. The selkie has been long out of practice, and he reduces a fair few meals to ashes, but glares at the boy whenever he even looks as if he is thinking of complaining and says, “If you wanted to avoid this situation, you would not have caught me; or you would have cooked better.”
The selkie never says it because the boy doesn't need to know and doesn't need one more thing he can hold over him, but the reason he cooks is that it, at least, is one thing he can control.
“Do you have a name?” the boy asked the selkie, over the breakfast table.
The selkie glared at him.
“If I do, it is none of your business,” said the selkie.
“Surely you must have one,” said his captor. “You cannot be the only one of your kind; and surely you must have ways to tell each other apart, to call each other, to speak to each other of each other.”
The selkie pushed his chair away from the breakfast table, suddenly not hungry.
“You have my pelt,” he says, quietly. “As you seem to only understand the taking of things which do not belong to you, I would not expect you to understand the value of a thing willingly given . Or to respect the nature of a thing withheld.”
Other than the first conversation he had had with the boy, it was the longest conversation that they had had so far.
The road to rehabilitation was a rocky one, and the selkie found that the hardest part wasn't teaching the seals survival skills (which he scathingly told the boy would have been easier done had the selkie been permitted seal form), but teaching the boy and his seals to do without each other. The selkie was of the mind that the seals were really nothing less than pets, and it was far easier to wean them off fish they didn't have to catch than the boy's love and attention.
There were good days - when the seals were able to stay out in the open ocean for hours on end, and a bright spot was when all three were able to catch their own fish, and there were bad days, like this one, in which the seals reacted to the constant attempts to persuade them to stay in the open ocean by invading the house. The sea lion had made it as far as the kitchen and caused chaos there. The boy and the selkie had needed to stage an intervention, and it had left them smelling of fish and frustrated sea lion.
“Were you born a selkie?” asked the boy, after they had shoved the protesting sea lion back into the seal pool for the fifth time that day.
The selkie caught his breath (it had been a hard struggle, for the sea lion had been very insistent on staying in the house, yet another sign that they had all been hopelessly domesticated) before answering.
“No,” he said dryly, “I was born quite human, and then I was bitten by a vicious were-seal at high tide, and every time the tides rise... well. I become as I was when you found me.”
For once, the boy is silent.
Not for long, though.
“You were not!” he exclaims, as if genuinely outraged that the selkie expected him to believe such a blatant falsehood.
The selkie tugs the collar of his worn (undoubtedly hand-me-down) shirt down by way of reply, exposing a jagged semi-circle of teeth-marks on his right shoulder. “It’s true,” he says. (The scar had been courtesy of one of a pair of fighting bull seals, when the selkie had been a pup and too stupid and slow to get out of their way. But the boy didn’t need to know that.)
To the selkie’s incredulity, the boy inspects the scar intently.
“I still think you’re a liar,” the boy says, skeptically.
“And I know that you’re a thief,” the selkie replies, and that is that.
As it so happened, the boy was not the only thief that the selkie had to worry about.
A series of burglaries had broken out in the town, and while the selkie honestly doubted that there was very much to steal in the aquarium, he was aware that the best time for a thief to strike was when one was least expecting it. He said as much to the boy, who at least consented to finally using the padlocks on the external gates of the aquarium (he showed the selkie where he put the key, and told him to use it as he pleased).
The locks were no actual use when the burglars did decide to strike one night. There were two of them, and the selkie heard them first, as they scaled the gates. He had been in the kitchen supervising the nightly dishwashing activities carried out by the boy, and he reacted by killing the lights in the kitchen and quietly announcing that burglary was imminent.
"Hope you've kept my pelt in the place where it won't be found," said the selkie, "Because if you haven't, I may actually need to kill you."
The boy grinned through his fear. "No one but me will be able to find it," he said.
"I'll hold you to that," muttered the selkie, as he indicated that they should leave through the back door. "Now let's get out of here." The boy had no telephone within the house with which to summon help, and their nearest neighbour was out of the gates through which the men had recently entered.
It was unfortunate that they timed their exit at the moment that their burglars (of which there were two) decided to come around the front. They had been seen, and in the ensuing struggle, one of the burglars had pulled a knife on the selkie, who resigned himself instantly to yet another scar (being preoccupied with attempting to incapacitate the other burglar) when the boy intercepted the knife with himself. The burglar's surprise at stabbing someone he hadn't intended to was enough for the selkie to disarm him (by means of a well-placed kick). To the selkie's intense relief, the scuffle at the gates of the aquarium had attracted the attention of a group of young people (whom the selkie later learned were marine biology students out to study the sea by night), who came to their aid and managed to subdue the burglars.
"What made you do something so stupid?" demanded the selkie. The boy had asked to see him before going for his stitches, much to the annoyance of the doctors at the emergency room of the tiny town hospital. The boy had sustained a nasty cut that ran down his side, and it would need to be closed up.
"Couldn't let you kick it before I gave the sealskin back," said the boy, matter-of-factly.
"If it's down to that, you shouldn't have captured me in the first place," said the selkie, disapprovingly. "Besides, there are better ways to distract assailants."
"Couldn't think of a better one at the time," answered the boy, rather too flippantly, the selkie thought. Then the boy looked directly into the selkie's eyes.
"The pelt is housed in a recess in the sea wall on the ocean face of the seal pool," the boy said. "Swim past the wire gate and turn left - above the waterline, you'll find a ridge in the sea wall. Sixth brick from the left can be pried loose. There's a lever behind that. Pull it and the face of the wall swings open. And you'll be free."
The selkie blinked.
"You're free," said the boy.
"And who do you think is going to look after the idiots while you're here?" asked the selkie, frowning.
"I wouldn't have thought it would be any of your concern now," said the boy.
"Well, that's where you're wrong," said the selkie, sharply. "I'm not going to be responsible if the idiots' rehabilitation is ruined by you being cooped up in here. You might take somebody else like me captive again and that would be simply awful. You're going to stay here and get well, and then you're going to come back and see the idiots off."
"Yes, sir," said the boy.
"All right, you've lost it," said the selkie, waving to summon the doctors.
When the boy returned to the aquarium, he found four seals instead of his usual three in the seal pool, all of which looked up at his arrival, but only one of which regarded him with utmost disgust while the other three swam excitedly to him, drowning him in a wave of welcome, barking and sea-smelling affection, demanding pets and nosing him boisterously.
When the boy looked up from the seals, the selkie had hauled out on the edge of the pool and was regarding him with the same disapproval that he had in seal form. "I don't think I'll ever be able to break them of you," said the selkie. "It's a lost cause as far as I'm concerned. But if you are willing to follow them down the coast to the rehabilitation centre, I think they are ready for the ocean."
"Thank you," said the boy. "And - I'm sorry. I know it won't mean much to you, but I am."
"You should be," said the selkie, scathingly. He looked at the open ocean and the sun's rays setting the waves on fire, then back at the boy. "And if I ever hear of anything like this happening again, I promise you, you are going to be hearing from me."
"Really?" asked the boy, grinning.
"That is not appropriate," said the selkie, severely.
"I know," said the boy, and his seals bark in what, to the selkie, appears to be complete agreement.
the end
email: edgeofdawn [at] gmail.com
Every morning the selkie woke (cursing the dawn), untangled himself from his sheets (cursing legs), climbed out of bed (cursing the necessity of human inventions), went to the bathroom and its cold floor (cursing feet, and very much missing flippers), and brushed his teeth while staring at his all-too human reflection in the mirror (God, when had he gotten that old?).
Then he shoved the hair out of his eyes, gritted his teeth and went down the stairs to have breakfast with the boy who had Captured him.
The selkie knew without a doubt that there were things more humiliating than being Captured (at his age!) by a boy who seemed to be barely out of his adolescence, but if there were, they had not happened to him yet.
Captivity had not robbed him of his ability to appreciate the fact that it was a beautiful day. The sun poured in through the window and trailed sparkling fingers through the pool beneath it, within which the run-down aquarium’s only aquatic inhabitants (two (actual) seals and one sea-lion) were positively frolicking.
The selkie would have glared at them if the glares had the desired effect (they mostly seemed to read his glares as Play? Now? and reacted accordingly with a great deal of unseemly enthusiasm).
Sometimes the selkie wondered if they knew they were prisoners, too.
The selkie could have cheerfully suffered (and had indeed suffered) many indignities, but the one he found hardest to swallow was being held captive by a goddamned human boy (and the victim of a particularly bad self-inflicted haircut at that).
Getting into this mess had been simple, as easy and as stupid as tangling oneself in fishing nets. He had been careless, and he had been a fool, and if he ever got his pelt back he was never going human again. Ever.
He had hauled out in a cave one night, and in his carelessness he had failed to realise that the cave had been inhabited by a boy armed with what the selkie learned later was a tranquiliser gun. He did, however, work it out for himself once he had awoken from a simple sting in his side to find himself distinctly peltless and comprehensively taken captive. He had not been restrained in any form as the sedative had rendered restraints unnecessary.
This was not how it was supposed to happen. None of the tales were anything like this, and the selkie cursed ever dismissing the old stories as Things That Only Happened to Stupid Selkies (who thought that dancing naked on rocks was an excellent idea when humans were in the vicinity), because he had assumed he wasn’t one, when really, this entire debacle only illustrated how eminently qualified he was for the title. (If he ever got back to his colony those tales were getting an overhaul and a complete retelling. As It Could Happen to You, Too.)
He had come to with an awful headache, a persistent and disturbing lassitude to his thoughts and movements, and worst of all, still human.
There had been someone leaning over him, and that someone had been talking nothing but unintelligible nonsense. It was only after the unintelligible nonsense had been repeated some ten times did the selkie realise his captor was attempting to speak extremely butchered Irish. (The selkie was not fluent in Irish, but a section of his colony would speak nothing but, and he had enough of a rough idea of the language to know when someone was trying to speak it to him.)
Soon the selkie could soon bear no more.
“Stop it,” said the selkie, eventually, “Your Irish is even worse than your manners. I can speak English, if you will stop trying to strip me of my sanity by mutilating the language.”
His captor had presented him with a deal forthwith, one that was simple, logical and in the circumstances, utterly ironic. There were three seals (two seals and one sea-lion, actually) in his charge who needed to be returned to the wild, and the selkie's assistance would be instrumental in ensuring their rehabilitation. Once the seals were able to fend for themselves, his pelt would be returned.
“Look, I don’t want you captive any more than you do,” his captor had the gall to say.
“Your lies are worse than your Irish,” said the selkie.
His captor had cocked his head to one side, and the selkie noticed for the first time, though the sedative haze, that his captor was really very young. “You know, being nasty to me isn’t going to get you free any sooner.”
“Being nice to you isn’t going to get me free any sooner either,” said the selkie.
On the first day (though technically the second, the selkie supposed, counting the day of capture itself) of his captivity, the boy had taken him to meet the seals, which were housed in a massive pool that connected directly to the sea. The seal pool was separated from the open ocean by means of a tall wire-mesh sea-gate, and it was the key feature of the aquarium complex which had become the selkie's new world.
As they approached the pool, the selkie noted that the entire aquarium was built next to the sea, and indeed hugged the coastline on its northmost side. He also noticed that he and the boy appeared to be the only people (in a manner of speaking) present in the entire complex, and also that the entire complex, save the seal pool, appeared to have fallen into rather advanced stages of disrepair.
The seal pool was, the selkie admitted, fairly generous and certainly more than big enough for the two seals and one sea-lion it was currently housing.
The boy seemed to have expected the selkie to commence working with them immediately, and was surprised when the selkie refused.
"I need to watch you with them first," the selkie explained, irritated at the need for words (seals never needed them, which was one of the reasons he preferred being one). “I have to see what bad habits you've taught them.”
He watched the boy approach the seals and groaned inwardly as one of the seals did a perfect backflip and came paddling up to the boy. Rehabilitation, if at all possible, was going to be an uphill task, and the selkie was too damned old for this business. If the seals had already settled into human-pleasing behaviours, adapting to the wild was going to be difficult.
The selkie watched as all the seals reacted to the boy's appearance as if he was the best thing since fresh fish. The sea lion swam across the pool to get to him, one of the seals gently butted his hand with its head (the selkie had not witnessed a more blatant show of Pet me! demonstrated by any seal over a year old), and the backflipping seal was positively beside itself with happiness.
Given the circumstances of his capture, the selkie had not been prepared to notice that it was fairly obvious, from watching the boy interact with the seals, that they loved him, and he them.
Rehabilitation was going to be harder than the selkie had initially thought.
"They're rescues, aren't they," he said to the boy, as he approached the pool.
"Yes, " said the boy, instinctively touching the seal nearest to him (who leaned into his touch - this would simply have to stop, human contact was not a thing that was often available to, or necessarily safe for, seals in the wild) as if to reassure it. "Can I ask how you knew?"
It had been no great leap of deduction. None of the seals had been particularly attractive, and the sea lion had had a massive scar, white with age, reaching from his eye to his tail. The selkie knew that no seal in the wild would have been able to survive damage like that without outside assistance. The selkie said as much, and then he steeled himself and said, "Are you certain that release is the best option? If you've had them for a while, they may not be able to survive the ocean."
"I don't think they have much of a choice," the boy said wryly, giving the selkie a sideways glance. "This place is going to be foreclosed in two months. No aquarium or zoo I asked will have them, and I'm not sending them to a performance centre - not that any such place will have them, either. The nearest seal conservation effort is a seal-tagging centre two hours down the coast, and while they monitor, they don't rehabilitate."
"There is a rehabilitation centre half a day's swim down the coast," said the selkie. "It's quiet and keeps to itself, which is why you may not have heard of it." The selkie's mother had been rescued there as a pup separated from her pod, but the boy didn't need to know that.
"I know," says the boy, looking surprised that the selkie knew. "But it's strapped for resources and for the moment can't take in any more seals that have to be rehabilitated from scratch. If I can get mine hunting for themselves and able to stay out in the ocean, they can keep an eye on them for me."
"You realise it's not quite fair to pull me into these problems of yours," said the selkie.
The boy ducked his head. "Yes," he says. "I know."
Being of a distinctly pragmatic bent and finding despair an exhausting emotion, the selkie was not given to bouts of misery with respect to his current state. He soon realised that other than the issue of the pelt, the boy was not cruel, which was a good thing. He was, however, an occasional idiot as in regard to his seals, which to the selkie bordered on cruelty by way of ignorance.
“Would you eat that?” the selkie asked, on the second day, watching the boy pour a ghastly mess of broken fish and fish heads before his sea lions, who looked at each other and then at their dinner mournfully, before performing a very human shrug and commencing to eat (in lieu of anything more palatable making its appearance).
“They don’t seem to mind,” his captor says.
“That’s because they know they’re getting nothing else to eat if they don’t eat that,” retorts the selkie.
“Fish are hardly cheap, you know,” says the boy.
The selkie rolls his eyes (this, he was delighted to learn, required no extra practice).
Life as a captive had not been what the selkie had been expecting (having prepared himself for the worst the moment the sedative had worn off). The selkie had inherited his pragmatic bent from his equally pragmatic mother, who had brought her pups up with an appreciation of the fact that Capture was a known phenomenon, and that it was eight times as likely to happen to a selkie in seal form than it was to a selkie caught Changing. Her pups had been taught basic survival skills suitable for both forms - indeed, being able to leave the colony had been contingent on a test that was, essentially, surviving the human world as a human, without reverting to seal form, for two months. This had been a particularly harsh test that caused some controversy within the selkie colony, as this test essentially simulated Capture, up to the element of surprise. The test, and preparation for it, was how the young selkies had been taught and learnt to practice essential skills such as communicating, obtaining assistance, cooking, and being able to withstand Capture.
In all ways but the most important one, the boy let the selkie have his freedom. The selkie could go where he wished within the compound and do what he wished in the time that did not belong to seal rehabilitation. His captor's company was never forced upon him for longer than necessary, namely, for the length of time it took to communicate how the seals were doing, how progress was, and what needed to be done. This was normally done at breakfast and again at dinner.
The selkie had his own room, and while there were no locks on the doors, the selkie never needed them. The boy never entered his room nor expressed any intention to do so. The selkie could swim if he wished and sleep when (and indeed where) he wished and help himself to the human food in the odd boxes and bright tins and in the tall cold box that was nearly as tall as the selkie himself.
The gates to the aquarium complex were not in fact ever locked. They led out to the small and somewhat sleepy town that hosted the aquarium. Padlocks were in place, but they were never actually shut, which the selkie felt was an odd practice, and certainly not secure. He had asked the boy as much, to which the boy had said that there was nothing worth stealing in the aquarium complex, and that the selkie's pelt was not stored within the complex, at any rate.
The boy had never in fact said that the selkie could not leave if he wished, but the both of them knew that the selkie would not leave as long as the boy had the selkie’s pelt in his keeping. The selkie’s very existence was a prison without bars; being human, his body was a cage all its own.
The selkie endured three days of the boy's awful cooking before he had enough. (The boy had, on the first day, offered him the same raw fish he had given the seals, and the selkie had given him such a dirty look that the boy had actually backed off. The selkie had never been offered anything but human food thereafter.)
On the fourth day, when the boy wandered into the kitchen around mid-day, he followed and demanded that all cooking utensils be surrendered to him, and knowledge of the workings of the Stove be imparted to him also.
“It is bad enough being trapped, but I refuse to be poisoned also,” said the selkie, vehemently. “Your skills in the kitchen are clearly why we say your kind kill their fish twice: once when they capture it, and once again when they cook it.”
The boy's eyes went wide with incredulity. “Where would you learn to cook?”
“Not all of us spend all our lives in the ocean, you realise,” said the selkie scathingly. “Really, for someone who’s caught a selkie, you don’t seem to know anything about us. Now get out before your presence ruins the food.”
Cooking isn’t easy, of course. The selkie has been long out of practice, and he reduces a fair few meals to ashes, but glares at the boy whenever he even looks as if he is thinking of complaining and says, “If you wanted to avoid this situation, you would not have caught me; or you would have cooked better.”
The selkie never says it because the boy doesn't need to know and doesn't need one more thing he can hold over him, but the reason he cooks is that it, at least, is one thing he can control.
“Do you have a name?” the boy asked the selkie, over the breakfast table.
The selkie glared at him.
“If I do, it is none of your business,” said the selkie.
“Surely you must have one,” said his captor. “You cannot be the only one of your kind; and surely you must have ways to tell each other apart, to call each other, to speak to each other of each other.”
The selkie pushed his chair away from the breakfast table, suddenly not hungry.
“You have my pelt,” he says, quietly. “As you seem to only understand the taking of things which do not belong to you, I would not expect you to understand the value of a thing willingly given . Or to respect the nature of a thing withheld.”
Other than the first conversation he had had with the boy, it was the longest conversation that they had had so far.
The road to rehabilitation was a rocky one, and the selkie found that the hardest part wasn't teaching the seals survival skills (which he scathingly told the boy would have been easier done had the selkie been permitted seal form), but teaching the boy and his seals to do without each other. The selkie was of the mind that the seals were really nothing less than pets, and it was far easier to wean them off fish they didn't have to catch than the boy's love and attention.
There were good days - when the seals were able to stay out in the open ocean for hours on end, and a bright spot was when all three were able to catch their own fish, and there were bad days, like this one, in which the seals reacted to the constant attempts to persuade them to stay in the open ocean by invading the house. The sea lion had made it as far as the kitchen and caused chaos there. The boy and the selkie had needed to stage an intervention, and it had left them smelling of fish and frustrated sea lion.
“Were you born a selkie?” asked the boy, after they had shoved the protesting sea lion back into the seal pool for the fifth time that day.
The selkie caught his breath (it had been a hard struggle, for the sea lion had been very insistent on staying in the house, yet another sign that they had all been hopelessly domesticated) before answering.
“No,” he said dryly, “I was born quite human, and then I was bitten by a vicious were-seal at high tide, and every time the tides rise... well. I become as I was when you found me.”
For once, the boy is silent.
Not for long, though.
“You were not!” he exclaims, as if genuinely outraged that the selkie expected him to believe such a blatant falsehood.
The selkie tugs the collar of his worn (undoubtedly hand-me-down) shirt down by way of reply, exposing a jagged semi-circle of teeth-marks on his right shoulder. “It’s true,” he says. (The scar had been courtesy of one of a pair of fighting bull seals, when the selkie had been a pup and too stupid and slow to get out of their way. But the boy didn’t need to know that.)
To the selkie’s incredulity, the boy inspects the scar intently.
“I still think you’re a liar,” the boy says, skeptically.
“And I know that you’re a thief,” the selkie replies, and that is that.
As it so happened, the boy was not the only thief that the selkie had to worry about.
A series of burglaries had broken out in the town, and while the selkie honestly doubted that there was very much to steal in the aquarium, he was aware that the best time for a thief to strike was when one was least expecting it. He said as much to the boy, who at least consented to finally using the padlocks on the external gates of the aquarium (he showed the selkie where he put the key, and told him to use it as he pleased).
The locks were no actual use when the burglars did decide to strike one night. There were two of them, and the selkie heard them first, as they scaled the gates. He had been in the kitchen supervising the nightly dishwashing activities carried out by the boy, and he reacted by killing the lights in the kitchen and quietly announcing that burglary was imminent.
"Hope you've kept my pelt in the place where it won't be found," said the selkie, "Because if you haven't, I may actually need to kill you."
The boy grinned through his fear. "No one but me will be able to find it," he said.
"I'll hold you to that," muttered the selkie, as he indicated that they should leave through the back door. "Now let's get out of here." The boy had no telephone within the house with which to summon help, and their nearest neighbour was out of the gates through which the men had recently entered.
It was unfortunate that they timed their exit at the moment that their burglars (of which there were two) decided to come around the front. They had been seen, and in the ensuing struggle, one of the burglars had pulled a knife on the selkie, who resigned himself instantly to yet another scar (being preoccupied with attempting to incapacitate the other burglar) when the boy intercepted the knife with himself. The burglar's surprise at stabbing someone he hadn't intended to was enough for the selkie to disarm him (by means of a well-placed kick). To the selkie's intense relief, the scuffle at the gates of the aquarium had attracted the attention of a group of young people (whom the selkie later learned were marine biology students out to study the sea by night), who came to their aid and managed to subdue the burglars.
"What made you do something so stupid?" demanded the selkie. The boy had asked to see him before going for his stitches, much to the annoyance of the doctors at the emergency room of the tiny town hospital. The boy had sustained a nasty cut that ran down his side, and it would need to be closed up.
"Couldn't let you kick it before I gave the sealskin back," said the boy, matter-of-factly.
"If it's down to that, you shouldn't have captured me in the first place," said the selkie, disapprovingly. "Besides, there are better ways to distract assailants."
"Couldn't think of a better one at the time," answered the boy, rather too flippantly, the selkie thought. Then the boy looked directly into the selkie's eyes.
"The pelt is housed in a recess in the sea wall on the ocean face of the seal pool," the boy said. "Swim past the wire gate and turn left - above the waterline, you'll find a ridge in the sea wall. Sixth brick from the left can be pried loose. There's a lever behind that. Pull it and the face of the wall swings open. And you'll be free."
The selkie blinked.
"You're free," said the boy.
"And who do you think is going to look after the idiots while you're here?" asked the selkie, frowning.
"I wouldn't have thought it would be any of your concern now," said the boy.
"Well, that's where you're wrong," said the selkie, sharply. "I'm not going to be responsible if the idiots' rehabilitation is ruined by you being cooped up in here. You might take somebody else like me captive again and that would be simply awful. You're going to stay here and get well, and then you're going to come back and see the idiots off."
"Yes, sir," said the boy.
"All right, you've lost it," said the selkie, waving to summon the doctors.
When the boy returned to the aquarium, he found four seals instead of his usual three in the seal pool, all of which looked up at his arrival, but only one of which regarded him with utmost disgust while the other three swam excitedly to him, drowning him in a wave of welcome, barking and sea-smelling affection, demanding pets and nosing him boisterously.
When the boy looked up from the seals, the selkie had hauled out on the edge of the pool and was regarding him with the same disapproval that he had in seal form. "I don't think I'll ever be able to break them of you," said the selkie. "It's a lost cause as far as I'm concerned. But if you are willing to follow them down the coast to the rehabilitation centre, I think they are ready for the ocean."
"Thank you," said the boy. "And - I'm sorry. I know it won't mean much to you, but I am."
"You should be," said the selkie, scathingly. He looked at the open ocean and the sun's rays setting the waves on fire, then back at the boy. "And if I ever hear of anything like this happening again, I promise you, you are going to be hearing from me."
"Really?" asked the boy, grinning.
"That is not appropriate," said the selkie, severely.
"I know," said the boy, and his seals bark in what, to the selkie, appears to be complete agreement.
the end