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In shape, Campbell Island resembles an oak leaf eaten away by insects, its coast indented by inlets and bays and two long, narrow harbors: Perseverance, into the mouth of which Marian splashed, and Northeast. Its slopes appear gentle, but walking is hard going because of the tussock grass and the mud and that dense shrub that John, the more botanically inclined of her companions, teaches her to call Dracophyllum longifolium. Besides the beards, as she thinks of Harold and John, and the dog Swift and herself, the island is occupied by sheep, rats, feral cats, sea lions, fur seals, elephant seals, the occasional leopard seal, a number of species of albatross, other seabirds and land birds, and two kinds of small penguins: the abundant rockhopper, which nests in the rocks, and the more secretive yellow-eyed, which nests in the bush and is usually glimpsed hurrying furtively up the beach.
She wonders if Eddie could have changed his mind. If he had, he might hold out for quite a while, survive off the supplies in Little America and by hunting seals and penguins. She wonders if he might be hoping she will send help after all, if he had truly been so sure she would not make it. She wonders if he is already dead.
She regrets the sadness she will cause Matilda and Caleb, and perhaps Jamie’s Sarah, but she thinks they might as well grieve, because she is gone.
The male sea lions have left for the year, Harold tells her. But the females have gone inland to pup, and she often encounters the animals. They burst roaring from the brush where they have hidden their babies, or they belly-toboggan down the hills on muddy trails, bound for the sea. Harold is conducting a survey of the southern royal albatrosses, and Marian goes with him to count nests and chicks and to hold the massive birds in her arms, one hand wrapped firmly around the bill, while he crimps identifying rings around their pinkish, leathery ankles.
They tramp all over the island, even in the excoriating winter winds, recording, in total, nine hundred and thirty-eight birds in Harold’s ledger. The birds are ungainly on the ground, easy to catch. The adults are magnificently white with good-humored black button eyes, thick pink bills, wingspans as long as two men set end-to-end.
When she first arrives, the birds are still sitting on their chicks, but gradually the young ones grow into hungry heaps of white fluff substantial enough to be left alone while the parents go to sea to feed. After their feathers come in, the chicks stand up and stretch their wings in the breeze, and, finally, around the time Marian leaves, the first ones fly away, making teetering, experimental leaps into the wind. Harold says once fledged they will not touch land for several years. They will fly around Antarctica, returning to Campbell from the opposite direction one day to breed.
Marian’s special purview becomes the sheep. Before the war, farming on the island had been given up as hopelessly unprofitable and the sheep left behind to roam wild. They are hardy and wily, the ones who survived and bred, and she finds herself drawn to them. Swift the dog shares her interest in the sheep, and slowly, with many failures, the two begin to learn how to move them from place to place, just to see if they can.
In one of the abandoned farm structures, she finds old shearing blades. She patches up a falling-down corral, toils patiently with Swift for days before they actually manage to drive a single sheep into it. John had worked with sheep in his youth and offers suggestions in passing, mostly leaves her on her own. Shearing is hard work; she makes a hash of many a sheep before she gets the knack. There is no real reason to shear the incorrigibly wild Campbell sheep, but it has begun to dawn on her that she will need a skill other than flying airplanes if she is to become a new person.
After she has been on the island six months, the beards sit her down and say they might have a way to get her to the mainland undetected. “We would have told you sooner,” John says, “but, begging your pardon, we weren’t so sure about you at first.” Harold’s brother, it turns out, is a keen yachtsman and has talked about sailing to Campbell for a visit in early summer, before the annual ship comes in January to bring fresh beards and take away the old ones. She could, perhaps, if the brother is amenable, sail back with him. They hadn’t wanted to ask him over the radio for lack of privacy, so they will have to wait and see what he thinks, if he comes at all. If he isn’t amenable, or she isn’t, well, then, they’ll have another think. “But you’re still sure,” Harold asks, “that you don’t want to be yourself anymore?”
She is sure, and the brother （who turns out to be even more taciturn than Harold） is amenable, and so after much silent valedictory hand-gripping with the beards, she leaves Campbell Island and reaches Invercargill at last, in January 1951, under sail.