She hauls her heavy 600-pound body out of the sea, after a treacherous 110-mile swim across a rough open ocean channel, evading toothy predators, and a male of her own kind in her wake.
She galumphs up the beach, a beach she knows well, and lays her short-furred body under a familiar naupaka bush, her sides heaving and not just because she’s out of breath.
The heaving intensifies in the tender hours of the night, her only witness a sea turtle resting nearby, and soon a wet bundle of black fur emerges, its red mouth already open, already demanding. She bends her big body to greet her pup.
This is the important part. Their noses touch. They take in each other’s scent. A mom again, she knows the drill. She’s done this eight times before, eight years in a row, rolling to her side, presenting her extended teats.
I find her soon after the sun pinks the sky. From the protection of vegetation on a lava rock bluff 20 feet above, I watch as the young monk seal pup searches her mother’s submarine body for the magic spot, the way on a hot day a soda fountain dispenser quenches thirst, desire.
The pup pokes her mom’s belly, she calls out, pleading, her voice a weak imitation of her future self. Her mom bends her big head toward her and responds, her voice deeper, a soft bark. I like to think she’s encouraging her pup, telling her, “You can do it.” But maybe she’s saying, “Figure it out, kid.”
Eventually, the pup masters the right angle and presses her soft lips against her mom’s taut body in just the right way and a spray of frothy, fat-rich milk spurts out, half hitting its mark, half coating the pup’s wide eyes, the pup greedy for more, more.
And you ask me, “What’s it matter if Hawaiian monk seals go extinct?”
—
Kim Steutermann Rogers lives in Hawaii. Her chapbook Denatured: Stories of Change will publish in June 2025 from Emerge Literary Journal. Her science journalism has published in National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Audubon and prose, recently, in Ghost Parachute, and Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine. Kim’s work has been nominated for Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fiction, and Best of the Net honors. She’s been awarded residencies at Storyknife Writers Retreat and at Dorland Mountain Arts.
