THE WALRUS HERD
On a bare, flat island of the ice pack sprawled a herd of walruses.
Sitka stared!
They were the fattest, ugliest, fiercest looking monsters the little
white bear had ever seen. They were not as fierce as they looked,
however, as Mother White Bear knew, for they lived on clams and
shell-fish. Their fierce appearance came partly from the long ivory
tusks with which they dug their clams.
They were enormous creatures, some of the old bulls weighing fully
two thousand pounds. Like seals, their legs consisted of flappers.
But there the resemblance ended. Instead of silky fur, they had ugly,
hairless, warty-looking hides, tough and wrinkled and of a muddy brown.
Neither have they the brains of the seal tribe: for they had found the
life of the clam digger so easy that they had no need of brains, and
Nature takes back what we do not use. Their thick necks ended in heads
so shallow that there seemed to be nothing there but a pair of tiny
eyes and the whiskers at the roots of their tusks.
On land these ungainly monsters were almost helpless in their
fatness,--instead of being agile like seals. But in the sea they were
marvelous swimmers, their layers of fat blubber helping there to float
them.
However, like all mammals, they will fight fiercely when their babies
are in danger.
As Sitka and his mother approached the ice where lay a herd of mother
walruses and their young, the mothers eyed them angrily, and the moment
they scrambled aboard the floe, several of them charged with the utmost
ferocity, bellowing and rearing themselves high on their hind quarters
as if to fling themselves on the intruders and crush them flat, as,
indeed, they might have done, had not Mother White Bear given Sitka the
signal to dive off into the water again. Dearly would she have loved
to treat him to walrus calf, but it was plain they would have to try
strategy in capturing such prey.
For a time they swam around, not too close to the mother walruses. The
fathers were digging clams, heaping great piles of them on shore, then
settling to their feast, or sometimes eating as they dug. Sitka eyed
these clam piles with envy and a little mischief. “Mother, I’m going to
try it again!” he announced. And before she could utter a warning, he
had made a dash for the breakfast a huge old bull was looking forward
to, as he dug away in the shallow water.
With a bellow of wrath the old fellow reared his monstrous head and
eyed the white cub with a gleam of anger. “Come back!” whoofed Mother
White Bear. But Sitka did not hear. The next moment the ivory tusks
would have come down straight into the middle of Sitka’s back, but that
he dodged, and slid into the water with no more than a red gash on his
white side.
“Just wait till I’m a little bigger!” he roared at the walrus. “You
just wait!”
It was therefore with huge interest that he watched his mother, towards
dusk that afternoon, prepare to creep up on a walrus calf. Bidding
Sitka remain in hiding behind a chunk of ice, she flattened herself
like a cat creeping up on a bird, and waited till it should be wholly
dark. She had fixed on a calf who, with his mother, lay a little to
one side of the main body of the herd, and in order to take them by
surprise, she and Sitka had made their approach by swimming first out
to sea, then doubling back and approaching with nothing showing above
water-line save the black tips of their noses.
In that interval just between sundown and the first stars, when it
was darkest, she began creeping slowly forward. Once her foot scraped
the ice, and the walrus cow looked up suspiciously, and Mother White
Bear held as still as a rock till the cow had gone to sleep again.
Then forward she crept, nearer, nearer, nearer, nearer! Sitka could no
longer see her white bulk for the darkness, nor could he hear aught but
the wind and the waves.
With a sudden dash she had broken the calf’s neck with a blow and was
dragging his huge weight back over the ice. The walrus cow was roused
now and rearing this way and that, trying to overtake them. But so
awkward are walruses on land that she could make no headway compared
with agile Mother White Bear; and though her bellowing awoke the herd
and they raised the most terrific alarm, they were still farther away
than she. In the inky darkness they only tumbled over one another in
their awkwardness, searching in vain for the cause of the disturbance.
Had Mother White Bear met them in the water, it would have been a
different story. But she did not take to the water till she had reached
the place where she had left Sitka. Then, softly, softly, they slipped
over the edge of the ice and began towing the fat body of the calf to
shore. It meant feasting for many days.
* * * * *
It was only a week later that they watched, themselves safely hidden,
their black noses just barely out of water, while a band of Eskimos
went walrus hunting, and Sitka marveled to see what cowards walruses
could be. As the little brown men approached in their kyacks (fearless
in these frail skin boats), the whole herd simply rushed terrified into
the water and swam for their lives. Even then it was simple enough for
the hunters to make a kill with their bone-pointed spears. Had the
walruses not been such cowards, it would have been the easiest thing in
the world for them to have reared their tusked heads out of the water
and crushed the boats.