Chapter Chapter 4 · The White Seal

The White Seal

Oh! hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,

And black are the waters that sparkled so green.

The moon, o’er the combers, looks downward to find us

At rest in the hollows that rustle between.

Where billow meets billow, then soft be thy pillow,

Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!

The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,

Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas!

Seal Lullaby

All these things happened several years ago at a place called

Novastoshnah, or North East Point, on the Island of St. Paul, away and

away in the Bering Sea. Limmershin, the Winter Wren, told me the tale

when he was blown on to the rigging of a steamer going to Japan, and I

took him down into my cabin and warmed and fed him for a couple of days

till he was fit to fly back to St. Paul’s again. Limmershin is a very

quaint little bird, but he knows how to tell the truth.

Nobody comes to Novastoshnah except on business, and the only people

who have regular business there are the seals. They come in the summer

months by hundreds and hundreds of thousands out of the cold gray sea.

For Novastoshnah Beach has the finest accommodation for seals of any

place in all the world.

Sea Catch knew that, and every spring would swim from whatever place

he happened to be in--would swim like a torpedo-boat straight for

Novastoshnah and spend a month fighting with his companions for a good

place on the rocks, as close to the sea as possible. Sea Catch was

fifteen years old, a huge gray fur seal with almost a mane on his

shoulders, and long, wicked dog teeth. When he heaved himself up on his

front flippers he stood more than four feet clear of the ground, and his

weight, if anyone had been bold enough to weigh him, was nearly seven

hundred pounds. He was scarred all over with the marks of savage fights,

but he was always ready for just one fight more. He would put his head

on one side, as though he were afraid to look his enemy in the face;

then he would shoot it out like lightning, and when the big teeth were

firmly fixed on the other seal’s neck, the other seal might get away if

he could, but Sea Catch would not help him.

Yet Sea Catch never chased a beaten seal, for that was against the Rules

of the Beach. He only wanted room by the sea for his nursery. But as

there were forty or fifty thousand other seals hunting for the same

thing each spring, the whistling, bellowing, roaring, and blowing on the

beach was something frightful.

From a little hill called Hutchinson’s Hill, you could look over three

and a half miles of ground covered with fighting seals; and the surf was

dotted all over with the heads of seals hurrying to land and begin their

share of the fighting. They fought in the breakers, they fought in the

sand, and they fought on the smooth-worn basalt rocks of the nurseries,

for they were just as stupid and unaccommodating as men. Their wives

never came to the island until late in May or early in June, for they

did not care to be torn to pieces; and the young two-, three-, and

four-year-old seals who had not begun housekeeping went inland about

half a mile through the ranks of the fighters and played about on the

sand dunes in droves and legions, and rubbed off every single green

thing that grew. They were called the holluschickie--the bachelors--and

there were perhaps two or three hundred thousand of them at Novastoshnah

alone.

Sea Catch had just finished his forty-fifth fight one spring when

Matkah, his soft, sleek, gentle-eyed wife, came up out of the sea,

and he caught her by the scruff of the neck and dumped her down on his

reservation, saying gruffly: “Late as usual. Where have you been?”

It was not the fashion for Sea Catch to eat anything during the four

months he stayed on the beaches, and so his temper was generally bad.

Matkah knew better than to answer back. She looked round and cooed: “How

thoughtful of you. You’ve taken the old place again.”

“I should think I had,” said Sea Catch. “Look at me!”

He was scratched and bleeding in twenty places; one eye was almost out,

and his sides were torn to ribbons.

“Oh, you men, you men!” Matkah said, fanning herself with her hind

flipper. “Why can’t you be sensible and settle your places quietly? You

look as though you had been fighting with the Killer Whale.”

“I haven’t been doing anything but fight since the middle of May. The

beach is disgracefully crowded this season. I’ve met at least a hundred

seals from Lukannon Beach, house hunting. Why can’t people stay where

they belong?”

“I’ve often thought we should be much happier if we hauled out at Otter

Island instead of this crowded place,” said Matkah.

“Bah! Only the holluschickie go to Otter Island. If we went there they

would say we were afraid. We must preserve appearances, my dear.”

Sea Catch sunk his head proudly between his fat shoulders and pretended

to go to sleep for a few minutes, but all the time he was keeping a

sharp lookout for a fight. Now that all the seals and their wives were

on the land, you could hear their clamor miles out to sea above the

loudest gales. At the lowest counting there were over a million seals

on the beach--old seals, mother seals, tiny babies, and holluschickie,

fighting, scuffling, bleating, crawling, and playing together--going

down to the sea and coming up from it in gangs and regiments, lying

over every foot of ground as far as the eye could reach, and skirmishing

about in brigades through the fog. It is nearly always foggy at

Novastoshnah, except when the sun comes out and makes everything look

all pearly and rainbow-colored for a little while.

Kotick, Matkah’s baby, was born in the middle of that confusion, and he

was all head and shoulders, with pale, watery blue eyes, as tiny seals

must be, but there was something about his coat that made his mother

look at him very closely.

“Sea Catch,” she said, at last, “our baby’s going to be white!”

“Empty clam-shells and dry seaweed!” snorted Sea Catch. “There never has

been such a thing in the world as a white seal.”

“I can’t help that,” said Matkah; “there’s going to be now.” And she

sang the low, crooning seal song that all the mother seals sing to their

babies:

You mustn’t swim till you’re six weeks old,

Or your head will be sunk by your heels;

And summer gales and Killer Whales

Are bad for baby seals.

Are bad for baby seals, dear rat,

As bad as bad can be;

But splash and grow strong,

And you can’t be wrong.

Child of the Open Sea!

Of course the little fellow did not understand the words at first. He

paddled and scrambled about by his mother’s side, and learned to scuffle

out of the way when his father was fighting with another seal, and the

two rolled and roared up and down the slippery rocks. Matkah used to go

to sea to get things to eat, and the baby was fed only once in two days,

but then he ate all he could and throve upon it.

The first thing he did was to crawl inland, and there he met tens

of thousands of babies of his own age, and they played together like

puppies, went to sleep on the clean sand, and played again. The old

people in the nurseries took no notice of them, and the holluschickie

kept to their own grounds, and the babies had a beautiful playtime.

When Matkah came back from her deep-sea fishing she would go straight

to their playground and call as a sheep calls for a lamb, and wait until

she heard Kotick bleat. Then she would take the straightest of straight

lines in his direction, striking out with her fore flippers and knocking

the youngsters head over heels right and left. There were always a few

hundred mothers hunting for their children through the playgrounds, and

the babies were kept lively. But, as Matkah told Kotick, “So long as you

don’t lie in muddy water and get mange, or rub the hard sand into a cut

or scratch, and so long as you never go swimming when there is a heavy

sea, nothing will hurt you here.”

Little seals can no more swim than little children, but they are unhappy

till they learn. The first time that Kotick went down to the sea a wave

carried him out beyond his depth, and his big head sank and his little

hind flippers flew up exactly as his mother had told him in the song,

and if the next wave had not thrown him back again he would have

drowned.

After that, he learned to lie in a beach pool and let the wash of the

waves just cover him and lift him up while he paddled, but he always

kept his eye open for big waves that might hurt. He was two weeks

learning to use his flippers; and all that while he floundered in and

out of the water, and coughed and grunted and crawled up the beach and

took catnaps on the sand, and went back again, until at last he found

that he truly belonged to the water.

Then you can imagine the times that he had with his companions, ducking

under the rollers; or coming in on top of a comber and landing with a

swash and a splutter as the big wave went whirling far up the beach; or

standing up on his tail and scratching his head as the old people did;

or playing “I’m the King of the Castle” on slippery, weedy rocks that

just stuck out of the wash. Now and then he would see a thin fin, like

a big shark’s fin, drifting along close to shore, and he knew that that

was the Killer Whale, the Grampus, who eats young seals when he can get

them; and Kotick would head for the beach like an arrow, and the fin

would jig off slowly, as if it were looking for nothing at all.

Late in October the seals began to leave St. Paul’s for the deep sea, by

families and tribes, and there was no more fighting over the nurseries,

and the holluschickie played anywhere they liked. “Next year,” said

Matkah to Kotick, “you will be a holluschickie; but this year you must

learn how to catch fish.”

They set out together across the Pacific, and Matkah showed Kotick how

to sleep on his back with his flippers tucked down by his side and his

little nose just out of the water. No cradle is so comfortable as the

long, rocking swell of the Pacific. When Kotick felt his skin tingle all

over, Matkah told him he was learning the “feel of the water,” and that

tingly, prickly feelings meant bad weather coming, and he must swim hard

and get away.

“In a little time,” she said, “you’ll know where to swim to, but just

now we’ll follow Sea Pig, the Porpoise, for he is very wise.” A school

of porpoises were ducking and tearing through the water, and little

Kotick followed them as fast as he could. “How do you know where to go

to?” he panted. The leader of the school rolled his white eye and ducked

under. “My tail tingles, youngster,” he said. “That means there’s a gale

behind me. Come along! When you’re south of the Sticky Water [he meant

the Equator] and your tail tingles, that means there’s a gale in front

of you and you must head north. Come along! The water feels bad here.”

This was one of very many things that Kotick learned, and he was always

learning. Matkah taught him to follow the cod and the halibut along the

under-sea banks and wrench the rockling out of his hole among the weeds;

how to skirt the wrecks lying a hundred fathoms below water and dart

like a rifle bullet in at one porthole and out at another as the fishes

ran; how to dance on the top of the waves when the lightning was racing

all over the sky, and wave his flipper politely to the stumpy-tailed

Albatross and the Man-of-war Hawk as they went down the wind; how to

jump three or four feet clear of the water like a dolphin, flippers

close to the side and tail curved; to leave the flying fish alone

because they are all bony; to take the shoulder-piece out of a cod at

full speed ten fathoms deep, and never to stop and look at a boat or a

ship, but particularly a row-boat. At the end of six months what Kotick

did not know about deep-sea fishing was not worth the knowing. And all

that time he never set flipper on dry ground.

One day, however, as he was lying half asleep in the warm water

somewhere off the Island of Juan Fernandez, he felt faint and lazy all

over, just as human people do when the spring is in their legs, and he

remembered the good firm beaches of Novastoshnah seven thousand miles

away, the games his companions played, the smell of the seaweed, the

seal roar, and the fighting. That very minute he turned north, swimming

steadily, and as he went on he met scores of his mates, all bound for

the same place, and they said: “Greeting, Kotick! This year we are

all holluschickie, and we can dance the Fire-dance in the breakers off

Lukannon and play on the new grass. But where did you get that coat?”

Kotick’s fur was almost pure white now, and though he felt very proud of

it, he only said, “Swim quickly! My bones are aching for the land.” And

so they all came to the beaches where they had been born, and heard the

old seals, their fathers, fighting in the rolling mist.

That night Kotick danced the Fire-dance with the yearling seals. The sea

is full of fire on summer nights all the way down from Novastoshnah to

Lukannon, and each seal leaves a wake like burning oil behind him and a

flaming flash when he jumps, and the waves break in great phosphorescent

streaks and swirls. Then they went inland to the holluschickie grounds

and rolled up and down in the new wild wheat and told stories of what

they had done while they had been at sea. They talked about the Pacific

as boys would talk about a wood that they had been nutting in, and if

anyone had understood them he could have gone away and made such a chart

of that ocean as never was. The three- and four-year-old holluschickie

romped down from Hutchinson’s Hill crying: “Out of the way, youngsters!

The sea is deep and you don’t know all that’s in it yet. Wait till

you’ve rounded the Horn. Hi, you yearling, where did you get that white

coat?”

“I didn’t get it,” said Kotick. “It grew.” And just as he was going to

roll the speaker over, a couple of black-haired men with flat red faces

came from behind a sand dune, and Kotick, who had never seen a man

before, coughed and lowered his head. The holluschickie just bundled off

a few yards and sat staring stupidly. The men were no less than Kerick

Booterin, the chief of the seal-hunters on the island, and Patalamon,

his son. They came from the little village not half a mile from the sea

nurseries, and they were deciding what seals they would drive up to the

killing pens--for the seals were driven just like sheep--to be turned

into seal-skin jackets later on.

“Ho!” said Patalamon. “Look! There’s a white seal!”

Kerick Booterin turned nearly white under his oil and smoke, for he was

an Aleut, and Aleuts are not clean people. Then he began to mutter a

prayer. “Don’t touch him, Patalamon. There has never been a white seal

since--since I was born. Perhaps it is old Zaharrof’s ghost. He was lost

last year in the big gale.”

“I’m not going near him,” said Patalamon. “He’s unlucky. Do you really

think he is old Zaharrof come back? I owe him for some gulls’ eggs.”

“Don’t look at him,” said Kerick. “Head off that drove of

four-year-olds. The men ought to skin two hundred to-day, but it’s the

beginning of the season and they are new to the work. A hundred will do.

Quick!”

Patalamon rattled a pair of seal’s shoulder bones in front of a herd

of holluschickie and they stopped dead, puffing and blowing. Then he

stepped near and the seals began to move, and Kerick headed them inland,

and they never tried to get back to their companions. Hundreds and

hundreds of thousands of seals watched them being driven, but they went

on playing just the same. Kotick was the only one who asked questions,

and none of his companions could tell him anything, except that the

men always drove seals in that way for six weeks or two months of every

year.

“I am going to follow,” he said, and his eyes nearly popped out of his

head as he shuffled along in the wake of the herd.

“The white seal is coming after us,” cried Patalamon. “That’s the first

time a seal has ever come to the killing-grounds alone.”

“Hsh! Don’t look behind you,” said Kerick. “It is Zaharrof’s ghost! I

must speak to the priest about this.”

The distance to the killing-grounds was only half a mile, but it took an

hour to cover, because if the seals went too fast Kerick knew that they

would get heated and then their fur would come off in patches when they

were skinned. So they went on very slowly, past Sea Lion’s Neck, past

Webster House, till they came to the Salt House just beyond the sight

of the seals on the beach. Kotick followed, panting and wondering.

He thought that he was at the world’s end, but the roar of the seal

nurseries behind him sounded as loud as the roar of a train in a tunnel.

Then Kerick sat down on the moss and pulled out a heavy pewter watch

and let the drove cool off for thirty minutes, and Kotick could hear the

fog-dew dripping off the brim of his cap. Then ten or twelve men, each

with an iron-bound club three or four feet long, came up, and Kerick

pointed out one or two of the drove that were bitten by their companions

or too hot, and the men kicked those aside with their heavy boots made

of the skin of a walrus’s throat, and then Kerick said, “Let go!” and

then the men clubbed the seals on the head as fast as they could.

Ten minutes later little Kotick did not recognize his friends any more,

for their skins were ripped off from the nose to the hind flippers,

whipped off and thrown down on the ground in a pile. That was enough

for Kotick. He turned and galloped (a seal can gallop very swiftly for

a short time) back to the sea; his little new mustache bristling with

horror. At Sea Lion’s Neck, where the great sea lions sit on the edge

of the surf, he flung himself flipper-overhead into the cool water and

rocked there, gasping miserably. “What’s here?” said a sea lion gruffly,

for as a rule the sea lions keep themselves to themselves.

“Scoochnie! Ochen scoochnie!” (“I’m lonesome, very lonesome!”) said

Kotick. “They’re killing all the holluschickie on all the beaches!”

The Sea Lion turned his head inshore. “Nonsense!” he said. “Your

friends are making as much noise as ever. You must have seen old Kerick

polishing off a drove. He’s done that for thirty years.”

“It’s horrible,” said Kotick, backing water as a wave went over him, and

steadying himself with a screw stroke of his flippers that brought him

all standing within three inches of a jagged edge of rock.

“Well done for a yearling!” said the Sea Lion, who could appreciate good

swimming. “I suppose it is rather awful from your way of looking at it,

but if you seals will come here year after year, of course the men get

to know of it, and unless you can find an island where no men ever come

you will always be driven.”

“Isn’t there any such island?” began Kotick.

“I’ve followed the poltoos [the halibut] for twenty years, and I can’t

say I’ve found it yet. But look here--you seem to have a fondness for

talking to your betters--suppose you go to Walrus Islet and talk to

Sea Vitch. He may know something. Don’t flounce off like that. It’s a

six-mile swim, and if I were you I should haul out and take a nap first,

little one.”

Kotick thought that that was good advice, so he swam round to his own

beach, hauled out, and slept for half an hour, twitching all over, as

seals will. Then he headed straight for Walrus Islet, a little low sheet

of rocky island almost due northeast from Novastoshnah, all ledges and

rock and gulls’ nests, where the walrus herded by themselves.

He landed close to old Sea Vitch--the big, ugly, bloated, pimpled,

fat-necked, long-tusked walrus of the North Pacific, who has no manners

except when he is asleep--as he was then, with his hind flippers half in

and half out of the surf.

“Wake up!” barked Kotick, for the gulls were making a great noise.

“Hah! Ho! Hmph! What’s that?” said Sea Vitch, and he struck the next

walrus a blow with his tusks and waked him up, and the next struck the

next, and so on till they were all awake and staring in every direction

but the right one.

“Hi! It’s me,” said Kotick, bobbing in the surf and looking like a

little white slug.

“Well! May I be--skinned!” said Sea Vitch, and they all looked at Kotick

as you can fancy a club full of drowsy old gentlemen would look at a

little boy. Kotick did not care to hear any more about skinning just

then; he had seen enough of it. So he called out: “Isn’t there any place

for seals to go where men don’t ever come?”

“Go and find out,” said Sea Vitch, shutting his eyes. “Run away. We’re

busy here.”

Kotick made his dolphin-jump in the air and shouted as loud as he could:

“Clam-eater! Clam-eater!” He knew that Sea Vitch never caught a fish in

his life but always rooted for clams and seaweed; though he pretended to

be a very terrible person. Naturally the Chickies and the Gooverooskies

and the Epatkas--the Burgomaster Gulls and the Kittiwakes and the

Puffins, who are always looking for a chance to be rude, took up the

cry, and--so Limmershin told me--for nearly five minutes you could not

have heard a gun fired on Walrus Islet. All the population was yelling

and screaming “Clam-eater! Stareek [old man]!” while Sea Vitch rolled

from side to side grunting and coughing.

“Now will you tell?” said Kotick, all out of breath.

“Go and ask Sea Cow,” said Sea Vitch. “If he is living still, he’ll be

able to tell you.”

“How shall I know Sea Cow when I meet him?” said Kotick, sheering off.

“He’s the only thing in the sea uglier than Sea Vitch,” screamed a

Burgomaster gull, wheeling under Sea Vitch’s nose. “Uglier, and with

worse manners! Stareek!”

Kotick swam back to Novastoshnah, leaving the gulls to scream. There he

found that no one sympathized with him in his little attempt to discover

a quiet place for the seals. They told him that men had always driven

the holluschickie--it was part of the day’s work--and that if he did not

like to see ugly things he should not have gone to the killing grounds.

But none of the other seals had seen the killing, and that made the

difference between him and his friends. Besides, Kotick was a white

seal.

“What you must do,” said old Sea Catch, after he had heard his son’s

adventures, “is to grow up and be a big seal like your father, and have

a nursery on the beach, and then they will leave you alone. In another

five years you ought to be able to fight for yourself.” Even gentle

Matkah, his mother, said: “You will never be able to stop the killing.

Go and play in the sea, Kotick.” And Kotick went off and danced the

Fire-dance with a very heavy little heart.

That autumn he left the beach as soon as he could, and set off alone

because of a notion in his bullet-head. He was going to find Sea Cow,

if there was such a person in the sea, and he was going to find a quiet

island with good firm beaches for seals to live on, where men could not

get at them. So he explored and explored by himself from the North to

the South Pacific, swimming as much as three hundred miles in a day

and a night. He met with more adventures than can be told, and narrowly

escaped being caught by the Basking Shark, and the Spotted Shark, and

the Hammerhead, and he met all the untrustworthy ruffians that loaf up

and down the seas, and the heavy polite fish, and the scarlet spotted

scallops that are moored in one place for hundreds of years, and grow

very proud of it; but he never met Sea Cow, and he never found an island

that he could fancy.

If the beach was good and hard, with a slope behind it for seals to play

on, there was always the smoke of a whaler on the horizon, boiling down

blubber, and Kotick knew what that meant. Or else he could see that

seals had once visited the island and been killed off, and Kotick knew

that where men had come once they would come again.

He picked up with an old stumpy-tailed albatross, who told him that

Kerguelen Island was the very place for peace and quiet, and when Kotick

went down there he was all but smashed to pieces against some wicked

black cliffs in a heavy sleet-storm with lightning and thunder. Yet as

he pulled out against the gale he could see that even there had once

been a seal nursery. And it was so in all the other islands that he

visited.

Limmershin gave a long list of them, for he said that Kotick spent five

seasons exploring, with a four months’ rest each year at Novastoshnah,

when the holluschickie used to make fun of him and his imaginary

islands. He went to the Gallapagos, a horrid dry place on the Equator,

where he was nearly baked to death; he went to the Georgia Islands,

the Orkneys, Emerald Island, Little Nightingale Island, Gough’s Island,

Bouvet’s Island, the Crossets, and even to a little speck of an island

south of the Cape of Good Hope. But everywhere the People of the Sea

told him the same things. Seals had come to those islands once upon a

time, but men had killed them all off. Even when he swam thousands of

miles out of the Pacific and got to a place called Cape Corrientes (that

was when he was coming back from Gough’s Island), he found a few hundred

mangy seals on a rock and they told him that men came there too.

That nearly broke his heart, and he headed round the Horn back to his

own beaches; and on his way north he hauled out on an island full of

green trees, where he found an old, old seal who was dying, and Kotick

caught fish for him and told him all his sorrows. “Now,” said Kotick,

“I am going back to Novastoshnah, and if I am driven to the killing-pens

with the holluschickie I shall not care.”

The old seal said, “Try once more. I am the last of the Lost Rookery of

Masafuera, and in the days when men killed us by the hundred thousand

there was a story on the beaches that some day a white seal would come

out of the North and lead the seal people to a quiet place. I am old,

and I shall never live to see that day, but others will. Try once more.”

And Kotick curled up his mustache (it was a beauty) and said, “I am the

only white seal that has ever been born on the beaches, and I am the

only seal, black or white, who ever thought of looking for new islands.”

This cheered him immensely; and when he came back to Novastoshnah that

summer, Matkah, his mother, begged him to marry and settle down, for

he was no longer a holluschick but a full-grown sea-catch, with a curly

white mane on his shoulders, as heavy, as big, and as fierce as his

father. “Give me another season,” he said. “Remember, Mother, it is

always the seventh wave that goes farthest up the beach.”

Curiously enough, there was another seal who thought that she would put

off marrying till the next year, and Kotick danced the Fire-dance with

her all down Lukannon Beach the night before he set off on his last

exploration. This time he went westward, because he had fallen on the

trail of a great shoal of halibut, and he needed at least one hundred

pounds of fish a day to keep him in good condition. He chased them till

he was tired, and then he curled himself up and went to sleep on the

hollows of the ground swell that sets in to Copper Island. He knew the

coast perfectly well, so about midnight, when he felt himself gently

bumped on a weed-bed, he said, “Hm, tide’s running strong tonight,” and

turning over under water opened his eyes slowly and stretched. Then

he jumped like a cat, for he saw huge things nosing about in the shoal

water and browsing on the heavy fringes of the weeds.

“By the Great Combers of Magellan!” he said, beneath his mustache. “Who

in the Deep Sea are these people?”

They were like no walrus, sea lion, seal, bear, whale, shark, fish,

squid, or scallop that Kotick had ever seen before. They were between

twenty and thirty feet long, and they had no hind flippers, but a

shovel-like tail that looked as if it had been whittled out of wet

leather. Their heads were the most foolish-looking things you ever saw,

and they balanced on the ends of their tails in deep water when they

weren’t grazing, bowing solemnly to each other and waving their front

flippers as a fat man waves his arm.

“Ahem!” said Kotick. “Good sport, gentlemen?” The big things answered by

bowing and waving their flippers like the Frog Footman. When they began

feeding again Kotick saw that their upper lip was split into two pieces

that they could twitch apart about a foot and bring together again with

a whole bushel of seaweed between the splits. They tucked the stuff into

their mouths and chumped solemnly.

“Messy style of feeding, that,” said Kotick. They bowed again, and

Kotick began to lose his temper. “Very good,” he said. “If you do happen

to have an extra joint in your front flipper you needn’t show off so. I

see you bow gracefully, but I should like to know your names.” The split

lips moved and twitched; and the glassy green eyes stared, but they did

not speak.

“Well!” said Kotick. “You’re the only people I’ve ever met uglier than

Sea Vitch--and with worse manners.”

Then he remembered in a flash what the Burgomaster gull had screamed

to him when he was a little yearling at Walrus Islet, and he tumbled

backward in the water, for he knew that he had found Sea Cow at last.

The sea cows went on schlooping and grazing and chumping in the weed,

and Kotick asked them questions in every language that he had picked

up in his travels; and the Sea People talk nearly as many languages as

human beings. But the sea cows did not answer because Sea Cow cannot

talk. He has only six bones in his neck where he ought to have seven,

and they say under the sea that that prevents him from speaking even

to his companions. But, as you know, he has an extra joint in his

foreflipper, and by waving it up and down and about he makes what

answers to a sort of clumsy telegraphic code.

By daylight Kotick’s mane was standing on end and his temper was gone

where the dead crabs go. Then the Sea Cow began to travel northward very

slowly, stopping to hold absurd bowing councils from time to time, and

Kotick followed them, saying to himself, “People who are such idiots as

these are would have been killed long ago if they hadn’t found out some

safe island. And what is good enough for the Sea Cow is good enough for

the Sea Catch. All the same, I wish they’d hurry.”

It was weary work for Kotick. The herd never went more than forty or

fifty miles a day, and stopped to feed at night, and kept close to the

shore all the time; while Kotick swam round them, and over them, and

under them, but he could not hurry them up one-half mile. As they went

farther north they held a bowing council every few hours, and Kotick

nearly bit off his mustache with impatience till he saw that they were

following up a warm current of water, and then he respected them more.

One night they sank through the shiny water--sank like stones--and for

the first time since he had known them began to swim quickly. Kotick

followed, and the pace astonished him, for he never dreamed that Sea Cow

was anything of a swimmer. They headed for a cliff by the shore--a cliff

that ran down into deep water, and plunged into a dark hole at the

foot of it, twenty fathoms under the sea. It was a long, long swim, and

Kotick badly wanted fresh air before he was out of the dark tunnel they

led him through.

“My wig!” he said, when he rose, gasping and puffing, into open water at

the farther end. “It was a long dive, but it was worth it.”

The sea cows had separated and were browsing lazily along the edges of

the finest beaches that Kotick had ever seen. There were long

stretches of smooth-worn rock running for miles, exactly fitted to make

seal-nurseries, and there were play-grounds of hard sand sloping inland

behind them, and there were rollers for seals to dance in, and long

grass to roll in, and sand dunes to climb up and down, and, best of all,

Kotick knew by the feel of the water, which never deceives a true sea

catch, that no men had ever come there.

The first thing he did was to assure himself that the fishing was good,

and then he swam along the beaches and counted up the delightful low

sandy islands half hidden in the beautiful rolling fog. Away to the

northward, out to sea, ran a line of bars and shoals and rocks that

would never let a ship come within six miles of the beach, and between

the islands and the mainland was a stretch of deep water that ran up to

the perpendicular cliffs, and somewhere below the cliffs was the mouth

of the tunnel.

“It’s Novastoshnah over again, but ten times better,” said Kotick. “Sea

Cow must be wiser than I thought. Men can’t come down the cliffs, even

if there were any men; and the shoals to seaward would knock a ship to

splinters. If any place in the sea is safe, this is it.”

He began to think of the seal he had left behind him, but though he was

in a hurry to go back to Novastoshnah, he thoroughly explored the new

country, so that he would be able to answer all questions.

Then he dived and made sure of the mouth of the tunnel, and raced

through to the southward. No one but a sea cow or a seal would have

dreamed of there being such a place, and when he looked back at the

cliffs even Kotick could hardly believe that he had been under them.

He was six days going home, though he was not swimming slowly; and when

he hauled out just above Sea Lion’s Neck the first person he met was the

seal who had been waiting for him, and she saw by the look in his eyes

that he had found his island at last.

But the holluschickie and Sea Catch, his father, and all the other seals

laughed at him when he told them what he had discovered, and a young

seal about his own age said, “This is all very well, Kotick, but you

can’t come from no one knows where and order us off like this. Remember

we’ve been fighting for our nurseries, and that’s a thing you never did.

You preferred prowling about in the sea.”

The other seals laughed at this, and the young seal began twisting his

head from side to side. He had just married that year, and was making a

great fuss about it.

“I’ve no nursery to fight for,” said Kotick. “I only want to show you

all a place where you will be safe. What’s the use of fighting?”

“Oh, if you’re trying to back out, of course I’ve no more to say,” said

the young seal with an ugly chuckle.

“Will you come with me if I win?” said Kotick. And a green light came

into his eye, for he was very angry at having to fight at all.

“Very good,” said the young seal carelessly. “If you win, I’ll come.”

He had no time to change his mind, for Kotick’s head was out and his

teeth sunk in the blubber of the young seal’s neck. Then he threw

himself back on his haunches and hauled his enemy down the beach, shook

him, and knocked him over. Then Kotick roared to the seals: “I’ve done

my best for you these five seasons past. I’ve found you the island where

you’ll be safe, but unless your heads are dragged off your silly necks

you won’t believe. I’m going to teach you now. Look out for yourselves!”

Limmershin told me that never in his life--and Limmershin sees ten

thousand big seals fighting every year--never in all his little life

did he see anything like Kotick’s charge into the nurseries. He flung

himself at the biggest sea catch he could find, caught him by the

throat, choked him and bumped him and banged him till he grunted for

mercy, and then threw him aside and attacked the next. You see, Kotick

had never fasted for four months as the big seals did every year, and

his deep-sea swimming trips kept him in perfect condition, and, best

of all, he had never fought before. His curly white mane stood up with

rage, and his eyes flamed, and his big dog teeth glistened, and he was

splendid to look at. Old Sea Catch, his father, saw him tearing past,

hauling the grizzled old seals about as though they had been halibut,

and upsetting the young bachelors in all directions; and Sea Catch gave

a roar and shouted: “He may be a fool, but he is the best fighter on the

beaches! Don’t tackle your father, my son! He’s with you!”

Kotick roared in answer, and old Sea Catch waddled in with his mustache

on end, blowing like a locomotive, while Matkah and the seal that was

going to marry Kotick cowered down and admired their men-folk. It was

a gorgeous fight, for the two fought as long as there was a seal that

dared lift up his head, and when there were none they paraded grandly up

and down the beach side by side, bellowing.

At night, just as the Northern Lights were winking and flashing through

the fog, Kotick climbed a bare rock and looked down on the scattered

nurseries and the torn and bleeding seals. “Now,” he said, “I’ve taught

you your lesson.”

“My wig!” said old Sea Catch, boosting himself up stiffly, for he was

fearfully mauled. “The Killer Whale himself could not have cut them up

worse. Son, I’m proud of you, and what’s more, I’ll come with you to

your island--if there is such a place.”

“Hear you, fat pigs of the sea. Who comes with me to the Sea Cow’s

tunnel? Answer, or I shall teach you again,” roared Kotick.

There was a murmur like the ripple of the tide all up and down the

beaches. “We will come,” said thousands of tired voices. “We will follow

Kotick, the White Seal.”

Then Kotick dropped his head between his shoulders and shut his eyes

proudly. He was not a white seal any more, but red from head to tail.

All the same he would have scorned to look at or touch one of his

wounds.

A week later he and his army (nearly ten thousand holluschickie and old

seals) went away north to the Sea Cow’s tunnel, Kotick leading them,

and the seals that stayed at Novastoshnah called them idiots. But next

spring, when they all met off the fishing banks of the Pacific, Kotick’s

seals told such tales of the new beaches beyond Sea Cow’s tunnel that

more and more seals left Novastoshnah. Of course it was not all done at

once, for the seals are not very clever, and they need a long time to

turn things over in their minds, but year after year more seals went

away from Novastoshnah, and Lukannon, and the other nurseries, to the

quiet, sheltered beaches where Kotick sits all the summer through,

getting bigger and fatter and stronger each year, while the

holluschickie play around him, in that sea where no man comes.

Lukannon

This is the great deep-sea song that all the St. Paul seals sing when

they are heading back to their beaches in the summer. It is a sort of

very sad seal National Anthem.

I met my mates in the morning (and, oh, but I am old!)

Where roaring on the ledges the summer ground-swell rolled;

I heard them lift the chorus that drowned the breakers’ song—

The Beaches of Lukannon—two million voices strong.

_The song of pleasant stations beside the salt lagoons,

The song of blowing squadrons that shuffled down the dunes,

The song of midnight dances that churned the sea to flame—

The Beaches of Lukannon—before the sealers came!_

I met my mates in the morning (I’ll never meet them more!);

They came and went in legions that darkened all the shore.

And o’er the foam-flecked offing as far as voice could reach

We hailed the landing-parties and we sang them up the beach.

_The Beaches of Lukannon—the winter wheat so tall—

The dripping, crinkled lichens, and the sea-fog drenching all!

The platforms of our playground, all shining smooth and worn!

The Beaches of Lukannon—the home where we were born!_

I met my mates in the morning, a broken, scattered band.

Men shoot us in the water and club us on the land;

Men drive us to the Salt House like silly sheep and tame,

And still we sing Lukannon—before the sealers came.

_Wheel down, wheel down to southward; oh, Gooverooska, go!

And tell the Deep-Sea Viceroys the story of our woe;

Ere, empty as the shark’s egg the tempest flings ashore,

The Beaches of Lukannon shall know their sons no more!_