The Pup in the Drifting Net

We found him at first light, below the high-tide line, where the night sea had left weed, shells, and wreckage along the sand. A dog walker had called it in: something alive in the tangle the tide had dropped, she said, though she was no longer sure it was still moving.

He was a seal pup, only a few months old, and he was wrapped in a drifting tangle of discarded netting that had washed ashore with him tangled inside it. The net had rolled in the surf as it came in, and every roll had wound it tighter around him: across his chest, over one front flipper, around his neck in a loose but cruel loop, and knotted hard around his tail. His grey spotted coat was dark with wet sand. He lay completely still on his side, and at first, from three paces away, I could not tell whether he was breathing at all.

Then his side rose, once, shallow and tired, and fell. His eyes were half-closed. Every minute or so a tremor ran through him and one flipper pressed weakly against the netting, and the mesh only settled deeper into his coat, and he went still again, spending what little he had. He had been rolled and dragged by the sea in a net that caught every wave and pulled, and by morning he had no fight left in him at all. He did not bark when we knelt beside him, or even lift his head. He only watched us through those half-closed eyes, too exhausted to decide whether we were one more danger.

We did not start cutting. A frightened pup who thrashes mid-cut can be hurt by the very blades meant to free him, so first we made him safe to help. I sat in the wet sand at his head and held him gently, one hand flat and steady on his shoulder, the other supporting his head clear of the mesh, talking low and steady. My partner draped a damp towel over his eyes. Under the towel his breathing slowed a fraction, and the trembling eased, and only then did the scissors come out.

Then we cut the net away strand by strand. There is no fast way to do it that is also safe. Some strands had to be lifted away from his skin a millimetre at a time with fingertips before a blade could go under them. We worked from the tail upward, freeing the worst knots first, pausing whenever he stirred. The loop around his neck came late and came slowly; I slid two fingers under it and held it away from him while my partner cut through it fibre by fibre, and when it finally parted he took one deep, unmistakable breath, the first full breath he had managed in our company, and let it out in a long sigh through his nose.

The complication came near the end, with the last section of net wound around his chest and his trapped front flipper. As the pressure of the mesh released, feeling must have come flooding back into that flipper all at once, because he startled hard, with more strength than we believed he had left, and lunged sideways in the sand. The loose netting still attached to his chest snagged on a piece of driftwood beside him and pulled tight again for one terrible second. Nobody grabbed at him. I held his shoulder steady and talked, and my partner lifted the driftwood clear instead of pulling the net, and the tension fell away. He lay panting, eyes wide now, while we cut the final strands off a body that stayed, by its own choice this time, still.

Freed, he did not move for a long while. He lay among the cut pieces of net, breathing, while we checked him over the way the vet on the phone directed: no deep marks anywhere the mesh had pressed, flippers moving freely, eyes clear, only exhaustion, cold, and a body worn thin by a night of fighting the sea. We kept him warm and quiet in a towel-lined crate in the shade while the tide turned, and let him sleep, because rest was the medicine he needed most.

We released him at the waterline in the early afternoon, where the water was shallow and calm inside the first line of surf. I carried the crate down and tipped it open facing the sea, and stepped back. He came out slowly, belly low, testing the sand with his flippers. At the first wash of water over his chest he stopped, head up, and then he was suddenly a different animal, pouring himself forward into the shallows in that rolling, fluent motion seals are made for. He swam a slow circle ten metres out, looked back at the beach once, then dove, and the water closed over him.

We named him Quan — the Vietnamese word for wrapped. It seemed honest: the drifting net tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that beach sometimes, at first light, when the tide has just gone out and the sand is strewn with whatever the night sea decided to give back. I think about how a pup can be caught by something nobody has held in their hands for a year, in the dark, alone, roll by roll. And someone happened to be walking that beach at dawn with her dog. And someone happened to look closely at a tangle of wreckage most people step around, and to stay on the phone until help came. He hunts out there now, clean-limbed and quick.