"There's a baby seal in the hall." This is the first thing out of my tardy student's mouth as he enters a room full of studious writers silently pecking away. "We should go see it."
"Sit down Ken. What are you going to work on?" This is the first thing out of my mouth in response to this interruption. My initial reaction is that there is no way a baby seal is in the hall of the school. In my teacher mind I am analyzing the credibility of this student against an attempt at getting me to lead a class of twelve high school students into the hall in search of a non-existent baby seal. I take the safe route. I convince myself there is no seal, most of my class seems to be okay with that decision, and class proceeds as normal.
Only later in the morning do I find out that there was indeed a baby seal in the school. A living, breathing baby seal. The story of its arrival is quite amazing. With the coming of spring comes the beginning of seal hunting. The warmer (a relative measurement) weather and longer days make traveling out to open water more desirable and the prospect of bringing home a seal (dead all cases but this) is an opportunity thats siren's call is impossible to ignore for many of the males in the village. This story starts on a day like this: The day before Ken's interruption in my class. His grandpa had gone out hunting and shot an adult seal. Upon the butchering of the seal they found that she was pregnant, and more importantly, that the seal in the womb was alive. Removing the baby from its mother they found that it was mature enough to survive outside the womb and that in all likelihood it would be able to survive into adulthood with proper care. It was this baby that found itself miles from open ocean, worlds away from its mother, and in the hallway of a school surrounded by large-eyed children.
And I missed it. By the time Ken's story was corroborated to my satisfaction the seal was on a plane headed to a rehabilitation center in Southern Alaska. Man...
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