Before turning in for the night, I stepped out the wooden door of the hut into the long twilight. To the east lay Mount Erebus, silhouetted majestically against a rosy sky. To the west, across the flat expanse of frozen sea lay the ribbon of Transantarctic Mountains. A helicopter, a silent red dot, skimmed the horizon and disappeared into the mountains. This spot of civilization gone, my writer companion, Sara and I were left alone in the still, expansive icescape of Antarctica . . . At least I thought we were alone.

During that night I woke to the sound of rhythmic descending clicks, then a muffled cry --like the sound of a gibbon filling its throat sac. As I lay half awake with my ear to the wooden frame of the bunk I suddenly realized these could only be Weddell seals swimming underneath me, below six feet of sea ice. Entranced by the symphony below, I visualized a graceful ballet of life in a world so foreign to mine, yet just a few feet away.

We lived many weeks in those small fish huts, just big enough for two wooden bunks, working tables and an oil drip heater. We were there as part of the American National Science Foundation (NSF) Artist and Writer's Program with separate projects. I was there to paint the spectacular landscape during the southern spring of August through October. With a daily radio call our only contact with civilization, we lived two hours from McMurdo, a station supported by NSF, which administers the US Research Program in Antarctica.

A few days before, I had found a round hole in an ice crack. I was contemplating that black circle when I suddenly jumped at a blast of steamy exhalation. Through the clearing air I could just make out a snout with two dark eyes staring up at me from the dim hole. With no predators here, the seal seemed unafraid, though as startled and curious as I at the sight of a strange animal.

With the temperature warming to minus 20 degrees F, the Weddell seals had migrated this far south, finding newly formed cracks in the thinning sea ice. With its dramatic ability to dive for over an hour without breathing, the Weddell can swim several miles under the sea ice looking for cracks. With its specially adapted front teeth, it can grate a hole within an ice crack, from which the females haul out and give birth. No predatory leopard seal, no killer whale can follow the Weddell so far under the ice without air.

One evening, after Sara and I had spent two weeks living in the ice huts expressing the barren lifeless landscape of early spring in writing and painting, I stood outside peering into the rosy light of dusk. Squinting into the distance, I made out 5 dark shapes on the ice. I sped to the door to alert Sara who came bounding out in her big bunny boots. Through binoculars we saw that distinct Weddell silhouette, an occasional flipper rising up against the soft pink sky as it rolled over. We stared at each other speechless, assimilating the new addition to our landscape.

This was a sign of spring progressing in this frozen land. As the sun wheeled around the whole horizon, barely dipping behind the distant mountains at midnight, the air had finally warmed up to -20 degrees F, enough for the seals to leave their balmy 28 degrees water and bask in the warmth of the low September sun.

Over the next weeks we watched them closely. Most of them lay swelled in pregnancy like blimps, the slim agile bulls remaining below to guard their breeding territories from other bulls. One day I sat by one female, awed by this creature, and for the chance to meet here where her alien world overlapped mine, if only for a few hours.

I sketched her, hoping to capture that serene expression in her eyes, the sleek fur texture and the round forms of thick fat layers that kept her from the biting cold. I sketched until that same cold crept through my clumsy gloves down to my finger bones. I had enough drawings to work from later in the hut, painting with pastels by the warmth of the oil drip stove.

Two weeks later, Sara and I were bouncing across the ice in our Spryte, a small tracked vehicle we used for transport. I slowed the Spryte as she pointed toward the rock island where the whiteness was speckled with seals like a pebbled beach. There I saw a reddish spot among them. We exchanged puzzled looks and veered off toward the seals, stopping just short of a wide crack.

It seemed too wide to drive over, so we stopped to check the thickness of the newly formed ice within the crack. Sara grabbed the ice auger from the back and with all her weight into it, cranked it around until it broke through, the sea water gushing up the small hole. With ice of only two feet thick, we chose to grab our ice picks and cameras and walk over.

As we neared the seals, I saw a small slug-like shape next to the larger one on scarlet-stained ice. We tread lightly, hopping over the more numerous cracks as we neared the island. Sure enough, a small, wet, gangly pup undulated along its mothers side, dragging the placenta by its umbilical cord, across frozen blood. Its dark innocent eyes gave no indication that after months in a warm dark womb at 99 degrees F it had suddenly emerged into a blinding white world of minus 20 degrees, all soaking wet.

Over the next few days, dozens of pups appeared everywhere suckling on a diet of thick milk, with over 50% fat, one of the creamiest of any mammal. I came back many times to sketch these young pups as they grew from formless furry rags to plump juveniles in weeks. It was a race with the encroaching summer, with its melting of the nursery floor, and arrival of hungry leopard seals and killer whales from the north.

In about ten days, urged by their bleating mothers, they were to take their first reluctant plunge back through the hole where the pregnant mother had emerged. Then honing their foraging skills on the abundant fish, the survivors would swim north again at the end of summer and begin the cycle anew.