Of a Cape fur seal living at Cape Cross:

0:13- Hunger overtakes reasoning and I slide down to the water for a midnight snack.

1:01- I’m shamed as my friends discover me in the water without them.

1:34- After some good-natured fighting, we climb back onto shore and fall asleep to the sound of our fellow species bark-bark-barking.

6:27- The sun rises, bringing light back to our little world.

6:30- After some more stretching and scratching, my friends and I maneuver around big bad bulls and piles of females to the Atlantic Ocean.

6:41- We finally arrive in the ocean. The waves are hard, but I love it. A big wave comes and I’m knocked back a meter. (I am, after all, a metric seal, being born and raised in Namibia.)

6:43- We find a big school of fish- breakfast for all!

7:59- The cold isn’t what causes us to drag our wet bodies out of the water; it’s fatigue. After all, we haven’t even slept five hours today!

9:16- After an hour of sleeping, I’m bored. I go stir up trouble in the big meanie’s territory, and he chases me up the sandy hill to the boardwalk where those nasty two-legs are. I hide under the walkway and finally go to sleep.

14:48- That’s more like it! After a good nap, I yawn, and those things the two-legs carry- shutterflies, I call them- start click-clacking. There is one small two-leg with brown hair above me and she aims an especially large shutterfly at me. I hear the two-legs around her call her “Eryn,” but the way they say it- at such a low tone- makes me believe it’s an insult. I see my buddies down on the beach and head toward them, avoiding the bull that sent me up in the first place.

14:55- Friends are finally reunited, and we all go in the ocean and try to find the school of fish that we found this morning. Well, we can’t find it, but we do ride some pretty impressive waves (and look pretty impressive ourselves, if I dare say so myself).

15:26- We’re exhausted and flop down on the rocks. We’re cooled off every 10 seconds or so by the pounding surf.

18:44- The light around me is dimming, and it seeps into my dreams. I’m surrounded by water, deep, dark, and cold, and I know that out there is a shark that wants to eat m-

18:45- I’m jolted into reality by a wave breaking on my face and one of my friends hitting me with a flipper. I lie on my back and observe my fellow animals. Some two-legs up on the boardwalk have covered what are, I think, their faces. I can’t think why- the stench maybe? But we smell like roses!

19:02- The sun finally sets. I splash around in the water a bit and then slowly, tiredly, make my way up the hill, passing skeletons and warm hairy bodies as I go.

19:09- I get my last glimpse of October 13. It was a good day, as days go.

Ciao!