ABSTRACT
I dreamt of my muse, which was a seal spirit, when I was undertaking postdoctoral research in Montreal, Canada. As soon as the seal spirit appeared, the story began to be tapped out upon my laptop and a tale began to unfold of seals in distress and being stalked by a psychotic polar bear that enjoyed skinning the seals alive, rather than eating them. I soon found the old adage to be true: Life imitates Art rather than Art imitating Life. For no sooner had I began to write than I started to come across reports of the sudden disappearances of seals en masse and, in late 2010, a strange phenomenon in which seals in both northern England and to a lesser degree Canada washed up on the shores with a strange corkscrew skinning pattern. They had been partially ‘skinned alive’ and not eaten in any form; the cutting was a precision cut, as though by some industrial encased cylinder.1 Scientists believe boats associated with the building of the Sheringham Shoal wind farm may explain the death of 50 seals whose bodies washed up on the Norfolk coast.2
