The Tourist Trail by John Yunker Page B

hill below, single file, looking up at him. He must have been standing in their path, and they appeared content to wait him out. In that moment, he was a tourist, another human just passing through.
    â€œI wasn’t accusing you,” he said to Lynda. “I’m just frustrated. Thinking aloud.”
    â€œCareful. Think too loudly, and you might offend someone.”
    Robert nodded. He was being too hard on himself—a recurring theme of his life—and too hard on Lynda, too. But he felt as though he were caught on one of those long fishing lines, that he was being pulled along slowly, inevitably, to some horrible conclusion.
    â€œLook, Bobby, don’t sweat it so much. I know you want to catch Aeneas, and so do I. But it’s not as if we’re getting a hell of a lot of support from the mother ship, you know?”
    Robert glanced at the photo again before folding it into his pocket.
    â€œBy the way, who’s the girl?” Lynda asked.
    â€œI don’t remember,” he said.

Angela
    Six hours had passed since Aeneas left.
    That night in her trailer, Angela imagined that she had said yes. That she had followed Aeneas to sea, that she was now high up on a deck, looking back at Punta Verde as penguins porpoised around her. The researchers would have their theories for why she left suddenly. People who did not know her would say she’d been kidnapped. People who did would say she was in love. But she was neither. Aeneas had been right. She was tired. Tired of watching trawlers pass at night, their multitude of nets and longlines and vacuum hoses sucking the life from the ocean with GPS-enabled precision, with her penguins as bycatch. Tired of days spent holding onto the ends of ropes, walking in circles. Tired of counting survivors.
    In the morning, she woke earlier than usual. She went to Aeneas’ empty camp, broke down the tent, packed up the trash and wine bottles. Later she asked Doug to help her carry the bags back to the station. He seemed happy to be in her good graces again. That evening, he offered to show her Neptune, but she declined.
    The next day, Shelly returned, and they all settled back into their old routines. The chicks were fledging. The breeding season would be over in a few weeks, and the penguins would waddle their starved bodies back to sea to drink deeply, to follow the fish, to elude the predators that waited just below the water line.
    Tourist buses gridlocked the parking lot and dirt road, a convoy of idling engines and exhaust. Angela skipped dinner that evening, knowing that Shelly would be there, that by then she’d know about everything that had happened while she was away. Angela knew she had to apologize, but she didn’t have the strength for it yet. She retired to her trailer alone.
    Later that night, a noise woke her, and she rushed outside, hoping it was him. Instead she found a pair of dueling male penguins. As she watched them, she cursed Aeneas for ruining her home. For half her life, this had been the only land that mattered, the only place she truly called home. Now the entire landscape felt barren and lonely.
    The next morning, a penguin was run over as it tried to scurry between two buses. Angela pleaded again with the guardafauna to shut down the road and make the tourists walk the last half-mile uphill to the trail. He said he would ask the provincial administrator when the man arrived in two months. But that was too late, she tried to tell him; by then, a dozen more penguins could get hit.
    No one seemed to understand that the penguins had a tight schedule to adhere to and could not wait patiently for buses to pass. That penguins weren’t comfortable walking through throngs of people to get to the water, to their food source. That these human obstacles could mean life or death for their chicks. Once, Angela remembered, a penguin had died of heat stroke waiting for tourists to let it pass. He’d died right there in front of