The Seal Who Kept the Harbour

There was a harbour at the end of the road, and a seal kept it.

Nobody had asked her to. Morag had come in one winter as a young seal, out of the weather, and found that the water inside the harbour wall was flat when the water outside was not, and that the slipway was warm in the afternoons, and that if she lay at the bottom of it with her head on the concrete and her tail in the sea, nobody minded. So she had stayed. That was eleven years ago. Now the harbour had a seal the way it had a wall and a lamp and a row of lobster pots, and the fishing boats came in past her and went out past her, and the gulls stood on her when she was asleep, and she was part of it.

She kept it, she would have said, by being there.

On the night this story happened, the last boat had not come in.

It was a small boat, blue, with a white wheelhouse and a name on the bow that Morag could not read, and it went out in the afternoons for crab and came back at dusk, always, past the end of the wall, and tied up at the quay by the steps. It had a cat. The cat’s name was Smudge, and she was black with a white chin, and she went out on the boat most days and sat on the roof of the wheelhouse with her eyes half shut, and she was, in her own opinion, crew.

Tonight she had not gone. Tonight she had been asleep in the net store when the boat left, and had woken to find it gone, and had been on the quay ever since.

Morag watched her from the slipway. The cat walked to the end of the quay and looked out. The cat walked back. The cat sat down by the steps and looked at the place where the boat should have been, and got up, and walked to the end of the quay, and looked out.

Dusk came, and went. The boat did not.

Then the fog came in.

It came the way fog does on that coast, not as a thing you saw arriving but as a thing you noticed had arrived. First the far headland was gone. Then the end of the wall was soft. Then the lamp on the quay had a ring round it, and the water went the colour of the air, and the air went the colour of the water, and there was no sea and no sky and no harbour, only a small grey room with a slipway in it and a cat at one edge and a seal at the other.

Smudge came down the steps.

She did not like the slipway. It was wet and it smelt of seal. But she came down it anyway, and sat, a little way off, with her tail round her feet, and looked out at the grey where the harbour mouth had been.

“They can’t see,” she said.

Morag had lived beside cats long enough to understand them, though it was not a language she had ever seen the point of. “No,” she said.

“They can’t see the wall. They can’t see the gap. They’ll go past it. Or into it.”

“They’ve come in before in fog.”

“Not this fog,” said Smudge, and there was no answering that, because there was no seeing the end of the slipway.

Out beyond the wall, a long way off, a sound came through the grey. An engine. Small, and steady, and slow, going along, not coming in. It went along for a while to the left, and then it stopped, and started, and went along to the right. It was the sound of a boat that knew the harbour was here somewhere and did not know where.

Smudge stood up.

Morag lifted her head off the concrete, which she did not do lightly.

The thing about a harbour mouth is that it is the one place in the wall where the sea can get in, and so the sea does, and there is a rock just inside it on the left, a flat one, that the swell washes over and that seals had used for ever, before there was a wall at all. Morag knew the rock. She knew it in the dark. She knew it, she supposed, in fog, though she had never had reason to find out.

She slid down the slipway into the water and was gone.

Smudge, on the concrete, saw a shape go, and a ring spread, and the fog close over it, and that was all.

The water inside the harbour was flat and black and cold, and Morag went through it low, with just her eyes up, along the line of the wall, past the pots, past the steps, past the place where the blue boat should have been, to the gap. She felt the swell before she saw it. The sea came in through the mouth in long slow breaths, and she went out with one and turned with the next, and there was the rock, under her, flat and weedy and exactly where it had always been.

She got up on it. It took some doing. She lay along the top of it with the fog all round and the swell going over her tail, at the very mouth of the harbour, on the left, where a boat would need to keep her on its left, and she opened her mouth, and she sang.

Seals do. It is not a pretty sound. It is long, and low, and rising, and it carries in fog the way nothing else does, and if you have heard it once you do not mistake it for anything else. Morag sang, and stopped, and listened, and sang.

The engine, out in the grey, stopped.

Then it started again, and it was coming.

It came slowly, feeling its way, and the sound of it grew, and then it was very close, and then there was a shape: a bow, high and dark, and a pale wheelhouse, and a little light at the top of the mast with a ring of fog round it, and it came in past the rock so close that Morag could have touched it, and she saw it turn, a little, to the right, the way it should, away from her, and go in through the gap, and the wake washed over the rock, and the boat was inside.

She lay a moment longer. Then she slid off and followed it in.

By the time she was back at the slipway, the boat was at the steps, and tied, and the engine was off, and in the great quiet that comes when an engine stops there was the sound of a cat going up a rope. Smudge went up onto the deck, and along it, and up onto the wheelhouse roof, and turned round twice, and sat, with her eyes half shut, in the exact middle, where she went in the daytime, where the crew went, and did not look at the seal, and did not say anything, and did not need to.

Morag came up the slipway. She came up it the way she always did, with the sea running off her, and put her head down on the concrete, and let her tail lie in the water, and shut her eyes.

The fog stayed. The lamp on the quay wore its ring. The boat lay at the steps with the cat on top of it and the water slapping softly at its side, home, tied, done. Out beyond the wall the sea breathed in and out through the gap, over the flat rock, in the dark, and there was nobody on it now, and no need.

The harbour was kept. It had a seal.