According to the chopper pilot's GPS readings, we've landed at 47^o 34' north latitude, 61^o 20' and 20" west longitude, or about 20 miles due west of the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. That's of little comfort to a New England naturalist who relies heavily on ridges, knobs, old stone fences, glacial erratics, abandoned cellar holes, and knowing to head due east at the big yellow birch with the bifurcated trunk to find my way out of the woods. The journalist who broke through the ice shortly after we stepped out of the helicopters was lucky; his backpack caught on the edge of the hole and kept him from disappearing altogether. With an armamentarium of camera gear strapped to my back, however, I would have plummeted through the fragile veneer like a condemned man falling through the trap door of a gallows. I would have vanished into inner space as completely as the ill-fated astronaut whom Hal, the malevolent computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey, jettisoned into outer space by cutting his umbilical cord.

Under an orange nylon survival suit, I have on so many layers of wool and flannel that I could go one-on-one with one of those cartoon characters who endlessly unzips one suit of skin after the other before I finally got down to my birthday suit. I've drawn the hood of my parka so tightly around my face that I might as well be peering through an oatmeal box with its ends cut out. Polarized sunglasses protect my eyes from the subarctic glare of the most brilliant sun I've ever not looked at - the snow an ice mirror its rays so completely that looking down can blind one almost as quickly as looking up - while thick, wool-lined mittens barely keep my fingers safe from the lethal subzero cold. I feel like an extraterrestrial on my own planet.

Chafing against the insecurity, I never-the-less look back at my trail of footprints - they look like Neil Armstrong's imprints in the moondust: closely-spaced depressions in the thin, windswept crust of snow with the same parallel treads as those made by the boots of his space suit. They are my umbilical cord. Though I've wandered out of sight of the others, I am not alone. It is the first week in March and I am surrounded by several dozen adult, female harp seals and their pups, some napping, some nursing, some skittering about on their bellies, others popping up through holes in the ice like whiskered jack-in-the-boxes. Just two feet from me, a harp seal pup, or "whitecoat", stirs from its sound repose. It whimpers plaintively, stretches, then lifts its head slightly and looks directly at me with large, coal black eyes that barely poke out of a ruff of pure white fur. After a moment, it yawns, drops its head, and let's its eyes fall shut again even before its chin touches the snow. It is absolutely unconcerned by the orange alien standing alongside it.

Now and then, the whitecoat's mother, an adult weighing perhaps 300 pounds, slick and glistening as wet rubber, rises half way out of a blow hole about twenty feet from where I am standing over her pup and peers over at us. She doesn't appear to be bothered by the strange babysitter either, and soon she slips back under the ice again to forage for crabs and capelin.

Grateful for her tacit approval, I decide to sit down on the ice and keep company with the whitecoat.

The moment I sit down, I notice a calming influence, as though I were drawing a measure of comfort from this serenely slumbering seal. My anxiety over being in such a precarious and desolate place dissipates. My back muscles relax. My pulse settles to its normal rate. Most of all, I feel oddly warmed, as if the pup and I were sharing a quilt.

I slip off a mitten. Gently, I stroke the back of the whitecoat, making just one, light, lingering pass over its silken fur with the palm of my right hand. I will rarely again be so privileged; it was as if I had laid my hand on the Christ Child's swaddling clothes. The pup opens its eyes briefly as my palm glides over the diminutive head and along the curved back. Then I quickly replace the mitten before the wind turns my fingers into popsicles. By the time I've slipped the mitten securely over the sleeve of my survival suit, the pup is snoozing once more.

Think of petting Love itself and you have some idea of how it feels to stroke a whitecoat. Alas, though it protects the little seal from the arctic cold, that luxurious pelt is also its undoing. As coveted as the Golden Fleece, like that mythical sheepskin, once possessed, the magic of a harp seal's pelt becomes its curse. It turns nations against nations, and snow into rivers of blood.

Since environmental activists (Remember Greenpeace ecowarriers spraypainting the whitecoats to render their pelts worthless to sealers who were clubbing the pups for their hides?) successfully closed the market on whitecoat fur in the mid-eighties, the debate surrounding the continued hunting of harp seals off the Canadian Maritimes has simmered. Now, the heat is on again as maritime fishermen are blaming seals for everything from severely declining fish stocks to unemployment, spousal abuse, and suicide.

I have come here to get the story, as a naturalist, to gain some insight into this extremely volatile issue and yet, as well, to walk the line between my species and nonhuman animals. In short, I came here to learn where I stand.

I've talked with scores of fishermen, environmentalists, and everyone in between. So far, I fail to see little more than a snarl of arguments offered by the proponents on either side of this emotional controversy. I might as well be trying to read my further in a pile of chicken bones, or assemble a picture from pieces of several different puzzles that somehow got mixed up in the same box together. Here's what I know.

Sealers are, in fact, fishermen, not unlike the men who "fish" for lobster along the Maine coast, or crabs in the Chesapeake, or clams, or shrimp, or, for that matter, fish. They're certainly not the antichrists we've made them out to be. Sure, I went to the Magdalens with a good deal of trepidation - which of us, having seen the images of sealers bludgeoning these adorable pups over the head with long, wooden truncheons until the ice was stained scarlet and melted into the blood of thousands of "baby" seals, wouldn't? Even if you hadn't seen the images of the slaughter, one poster showing a close-up photo of a whitecoat - that endearing whiskered visage with the ebony eyes - distributed during the early eighties, combined with the caption informing you that sealers clubbed these pups even as they suckled on their mothers' teats, and then, in their hurry to get as many pelts as possible, sometimes skinned them alive - was sufficiently heartrending to mobilize international boycotts of seal fur products, and virtually shut down the global market for whitecoat mittens, hats, and coats. The club-wielding fishermen were seen as vile, heartless, "baby-killers". Querying a bartender shortly after my arrival on the islands about whether he knew any sealers who might be willing to talk with me about sealing, I anticipated being taken to some seaside cave lit with oil lamps made from seal skulls to interview a Marlon Brando type who, as he lounged in a high-backed armchair covered with adult harp seal hides, and was himself clothed in blood-stained whitecoat furs, munched on fried flipper.

In fact, maritime fishermen fish for cod, halibut, pollack, mackerel, and lobster depending on the time of year. When in season, they fish for seals. They regard seals as just another component of the marine resource package - as one fisherman put it, "We are farmers and seals are one of the crops we harvest from the sea." In fact, Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans classifies the hunting of seals as a "fishery".

Even as I admitted that I was an environmental reporter, the sealers would invite me into their homes - very neat and tidy homes, I might add - to have lunch, to introduce me to their families, to tell me stories about the old days before snow machines when they would have to drag their sleds several miles out onto the ice and hope to return safely before nightfall, when every season someone's son or father our uncle was drowned or froze to death hunting the seal. Back then, they told me over biscuits and coffee, it was more for the meat than the hides.

No longer. Seals are now hunted primarily for their skins. Most of the fishermen I talked with admitted that only the old-timers still fry up a flipper now and again. "My children don't even like the taste of seal meat." confessed one sealer's wife. She was also the one who became very indignant when, during one of our discussions, I referred to a seal pup as a baby. "Only humans have babies!" she corrected me vigorously.

Still, seal hunting continues. Only the commercial hunting of juvenile harp seals younger than two weeks (the "whitecoats") and hooded "blueback" seals was banned in 1987. Harp seals older than two weeks are still hunted for their fur coats. Meanwhile, environmentalists consider seals to be sentient beings apart from clams and mackerel, and are fighting to stop seal hunting altogether.

Now, pressure exists to resume hunting of whitecoats and expand the seal industry altogether. In the spring of 1992, the Canadian government opened its seal licensing policy to all commercial fishermen. Prior to 1991, seal licenses had been issued only to sealers who had consistently participated in a seal hunt for at least three previous seasons. Twice as many licenses were issued in 1992 as in 1991, resulting in the death of 67,000 seals - double the number taken in the previous year.

More recently, John Efford, member of the Newfoundland House of Assembly, put forth a motion calling for a mass hunt totaling 500,000 seals claiming that seals have devastated Atlantic cod stocks, and are responsible, in large part, for the moratorium imposed on cod fishing in 1990. The cod fishery is a major component of the maritime fishery and the moratorium has severely hurt fishermen along the east coast of Canada. An Ad Hoc coalition of twelve groups including the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlottetown, The Canadian Fur Institute, and Indigenous Survival International have blamed serious social problems ranging from unemployment to suicide on the campaign to save the seals.

Since the European Economic Community banned the import of seal products in 1985, the global market for seal meat and furs has been limited, at best. Of the 67,000 seals harvested each year by Newfoundland and Magdalen Island sealers, only about 35,000 are absorbed by Canada's share of the international market for seal products.

Annemieka Roell, seal welfare coordinator for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (I.F.A.W.), believes that expanding the licensing policy was a knee-jerk reaction of the government to appease fishermen enraged over the two-year cod moratorium. Protesting that the seals are being used as scapegoats by the government, the fishing industry, and special interest groups, Roell, as well as members of the International Marine Mammal Association (I.M.M.A.) point out that seals often do come up smelling like fish - red herrings. She cites a report published in 1992 by Susan Wallace and David Lavigne from I.M.M.A. which disputes the claim that harp seals have any significant affect on cod populations in the western Atlantic. After analyzing the stomach contents from over 9000 harp seals, these scientists announced that "...all the available data indicates that Atlantic cod is rarely eaten by harp seals." Roell, and many environmentalists wonder what becomes of the surplus seal carcasses and, never mind expanding the hunt, why are so many seals hunted at all, given the minimal demand for seal skins and meat?"

One possible answer comes from the Chinese who are offering sealers $50.00 per seal to hack the penises off of 60,000 seals. A small bone inside the penis (Several mammalian species including dogs, some rodents, and seals have a bone in their penis to add rigidity during copulation.) is used by the Chinese in aphrodisiac potions.

Meanwhile, since the mid 1980's revenues from ecotourism have burgeoned. According to an independent study commissioned by I.F.A.W., ecotourism brings about $400,000 to the Magdalens annually while the potential income from seal hunting is about $480,000, that is, provided all seal carcasses are sold. Actual profits are much less, however, since there has been no market, and sealers admit they often fail to offset the cost of hunting the animals. I.F.A.W. believes that seal watching and seal killing are incompatible. Sealers disagree. On the one hand: ecotourists who come to see the seals each spring are furious when they are told that the seals are still being hunted. On the other hand: no-one without a seal hunting license, including journalists, is allowed anywhere near the hunting areas.

Staring at the bare bones of the issue, I realize something is missing. The task before me, as a journalist, is to present the facts, to be objective, not to draw conclusions, but to delineate the arguments and present them as clearly as possible. Just the facts, thank you, that's all.

Yet, by themselves, the facts amount to nothing more than a grocery list of pros and cons, a jumble of inarticulated bones. Like an archeologist, I've been scratching for ribs and femurs and jawbones and pieces of cranium in order to articulate a coherent story. Somehow, I must provide the connective tissue, the sinew and the tendon.

Perfect snowflakes appear out of the fog and settle on the young seal's brilliant coat, quickly draping it in a lacy filigree. I check to make sure that my umbilical cord is clearly visible, and then gaze out over the heads of the female and juvenile harp seals that have claimed this floating, football field-size, slab of ice as their nursery. The frozen air is filled with the cries and whimpers of the pups, while the adults provide the occasional timpani. I dig my tape recorder out of the deep right pocket of my survival suit and note that the sound resembles the cries and whimpers of human babies, but before completing the comment I reproach myself for anthropomorphizing and shut off the recorder. After a moment, I press the record button again. "But it does sound like a human nursery, damn it!"

The pup stirs, rolls onto its back and scratches its belly with the claws at the end of its flipper, all without waking. It remains on its back and sleeps with its flippers folded neatly along its sides, and its tiny black nose pointing at something in the heavens. The snow squall has passed, but it is still foggy.

Through the fog, I hear the engine of the chopper cough, sputter, and catch, and the whir of the blades rising like a tea kettle coming to boil. It is time to leave.

Gathering up my thoughts, I begin walking back toward the chopper. At that moment, the mother shoots out of the blow hole like a giant beach ball that had been held underwater and suddenly released. With her clawed flippers, she pulls herself swiftly across the ice toward her pup. On her mottled gray back, she bares her signature - the distinctive black, harp-shaped marking for which these seals are named. The pup, awakened by its mother's grunts and groans, whines, and crawls over to meet her.

Face to face, they touch noses, sniffing, recognizing, acknowledging one another. Then the female rolls over onto her side as the pup sidles alongside her. It finds a convenient teat, and begins suckling. I walk by the two of them, within six feet of the mother nursing her pup. As I pass, the female looks up and directly at me, fixating me in my tracks.

For almost a minute we hold each other's eyes while the pup nurses intently, audibly on her teat. I am transfixed. To be so close to these animals at such an intimate and vulnerable time! I feel oddly privileged, as though I have been invited by nature, if nature were a person, a king, or a queen, a God even, to be there, to be so fortunate as to see that, to have nature manifest herself in the form of a seal and allow me to look her straight in the face. I am not worthy of the honor; not long ago, my kind would have clubbed that pup even as it nursed. Now, we merely wait two weeks before we slaughter these animals, peel them, and wrap ourselves in their skins.

Those eyes. That face. This was not the walleyed stare of a biological automaton. Not sentience perhaps, but something, some semblance of awareness was there; some flicker of understanding surely lurked behind those weeping black orbs, inside that mammalian brain. I'm sure of it.

The bones of my story began to articulate as though that seal's gaze were sewing them together for me. The missing element had been there right in front of me all along - the seals themselves were the sinew and the tendon of the entire issue!

I found myself wanting to allow the seals to affect me, even, if they could, persuade me, not just objectively by my knowledge of their stomach contents, but subjectively as well.

Still, as a journalist grounded in objective, matter-of-fact reporting, I resisted the inclination - for as long as I could. Until that moment when the nursing female's eyes met mine, I had successfully repressed and refrained from noting my subjective impulses toward the seals. Her penetrating look was my undoing; it catapulted me over that formidable barrier into the realm where journalists rarely dare to tread.

Peering into those eyes, I experienced an epiphany. I realized that after all my research and interviews with seal hunters to ardent animal rights activists I was never, until now, truly face-to-face with the essence of the issue. The seals are the issue - not their diet, or the decline in cod populations, or the social problems resulting from a change in lifestyle no matter what the cause, or even the bottom line from sealing or ecotourism. This story is no more about politics and economics, or jobs vs. tourism, than the story of America is about pilgrims and freedom from oppression. At least Geronimo and Frederick Douglas could plead the case on behalf of their own kind. They had a voice.

I groped for a non-human adjective that would accurately describe the expression on that animal's face, yet there was only one word that could honestly convey what I perceived in those eyes: they were undeniably beseeching. What she, in turn, saw on my face, what she perceived about me, I cannot know. In fact, I felt acute empathy and commiseration.

Turning her head, the female eventually released her hold on me to look down at her pup, and then she gazed off across the ice, over the heads of the dozens of other seals engaged in similar maternal responsibilities. I bid them both farewell and walked slowly back toward the waiting chopper. In spite of the subzero temperature I felt as though I had just sipped an entire pot of hot tea.

Surely, I thought, as I followed my footprints back to the waiting helicopter, these animals are much more than the sum of their anatomy and physiology, much more than a source of revenue, meat, fur coats, or penis bones, much more than a traditional annual diversion for hunters. They are even much more than a tourist attraction. Recent research shows that ravens are capable of insight, that dolphins and parrots understand the syntax of human language, that chimpanzees use tools and are capable of strategic planning. Perhaps some day, we will know objectively what we are only beginning to suspect today: that many animals, other than ourselves, are more like us than we had ever imagined, that they posses powers of reasoning, feelings and desires similar to our own, albeit to a lesser degree. Perhaps we will discover just how arrogant and sectarian our perspective of nonhuman life has been.

Until that day, the animals themselves do not get a hearing, a chance, if you will, to plead their case. We continue to regard them as just so much flesh, bone, fur, and fat, operating primarily on instinct without any, or at best an insignificant capacity for reasoning, and devoid of emotion. There are even people who claim that non-human animals are incapable of experiencing pain!

Now, I know this: in the presence of the seals, the economic, the traditional, even some of the ecological reasons we may have to slaughter them struck me as so much arrogant nonsense. In their midst, the notion that we humans have hegemony of all other forms of life seemed as antediluvian as accusing a women with knowledge of herbs and spiritual healing of being a witch, and condemning her to burn at the stake.

We must begin to know other species in ways that transcend our knowledge about their biology and ecology. We must be willing to understand them as living beings, as complex, as enigmatic, as wonderful and intriguing, and with the same intrinsic values, and the same right to live out their lives as you and I. And a genuine understanding can only come from intimate and personal experience with the wildlife or environment at the heart of an issue. Only then do we have all the facts from which to draw a responsible conclusion, and the connective tissue with which to tell the story honestly and sincerely. That's where I stand.

Ascending above the ice, I caught sight of that pair of seals again. The pup was still nursing as we climbed through the fog, and the seals faded from view. Soon we were skimming over a shallow sea of gilded clouds, and it was easy to imagine that we were reentering the atmosphere surrounding our home planet following a long journey to an unearthly, yet strangely beautiful place. By the time we sighted land, I had once again begun to the think of the seals as remote and exotic, and a man's boot print on the lunar surface seemed more familiar than my own tracks on that ephemeral ice floe. Strange, that we can be so estranged from our environment that the moon feels closer to our everyday lives than our own home ground.

Back at the hotel, after a long, hot shower, I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes for a while before going to dinner. There, as vivid in my mind as though I were back on the ice, was that harp seal with her nursing pup. I held the female's limpid eyes until the gray afternoon light guttered in the curtained window, until the hotel restaurant closed, until I was sitting alongside the two of them again watching that whitecoat pup suckling on its mother's milk, my ears brimming with the voices of seals.