The Tourist Trail by John Yunker

on her own, finding the edges of a circle was best accomplished with two people. She stood Aeneas in the middle of one of Shelly’s mapped circles, a measured piece of rope in one hand, her notebook in the other, while she walked the perimeter, holding the other end of the rope, calling out what she found: single male, active pair, one egg, two eggs, inactive nest.
    â€œSo is the colony growing or shrinking?” he asked.
    â€œShrinking. Though I can’t say how much. That’s why we’re here.”
    â€œHow many of these circles do we have to do?” he asked.
    â€œYou have somewhere better to be?”
    â€œI’m just curious.”
    â€œA hundred or so,” Angela said. “I could try calling your ship from our research station.”
    â€œThey’ll call me. Fortunately, my satphone is waterproof,” he said. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
    She didn’t answer him. He’d been there for two nights now, and Angela wasn’t sure how long she could keep him hidden from the rest. At least keeping him close to her kept him away from the others. The circles would last for another day or so, and then what? He drank too much. He continued to reach for her, beginning with her shoulder, resting a hand, then two, massaging her neck. She no longer resisted. When he drank he also talked, and she found his stories exciting.
    That night, she brought two bottles of Malbec. “To celebrate a hard day’s work,” she said. As they began to pass the first bottle between them, she asked him how he’d gotten his alias.
    â€œWhen we took our first whaling ship out of commission, I spray-painted Aeneas across the hull,” he said. “I figured it would confuse them. It did, for a period. But the name stuck.”
    â€œWhy Aeneas ?”
    â€œBecause he was fearless. Because he was a man without a country, a man without a port.”
    Aeneas stood and looked through the darkness toward the ocean. He looked anxious to return, and Angela felt bad for reminding him that he was not out there. She tried to steer him back toward land.
    â€œWhere will you go when the whaling season ends?” she asked.
    â€œI’ll head north. There’s always a hunting season for something somewhere.”
    â€œDon’t you have a home to return to?”
    â€œMy home is the ship.”
    â€œBut don’t you rest at all?”
    â€œDo you?”
    Angela smiled. “No.”
    â€œAs long as there are fishermen out there, I’ll be out there. Fishermen don’t fish anymore. They slaughter, obliterate, expunge. They use vacuums, for fuck’s sake. That’s not fishing. That’s extermination. When you raise cattle, you at least feed them. But fishermen don’t feed fish. They just take. They even take the food the fish eat. Sheer avarice. I could kill them all.”
    He emptied the bottle.
    â€œHow’d you end up here, in Argentina?” Angela asked.
    He paused, then reached for the second bottle. “A few weeks ago,” he said, “we came across a fishing trawler poaching in protected waters. I got in a Zodiac and started pulling in their longline. One of my volunteers was helping.” He uncorked the bottle and drank before offering it to Angela. She shook her head.
    â€œShe was young, and it was her first season with us,” he continued. “She was all fired up, and stubborn as hell. I had a difficult time saying no to that woman. I should have. I should have left her back on the ship.”
    He went silent, and Angela waited. She was learning that he tended to communicate in waves of dialogue, broken up by gaps of wind-blown silence. Initially, the silence made her nervous, and she filled the gaps with penguin trivia. But he wasn’t really listening to her, so she eventually let the silence flow over the both of them. She came to enjoy the intimacy between people who were silent together.
    â€œI