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
odd 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 dogteeth. When he heaved himself up on his
front flippers he stood more than four feet clear of the ground, and his
weight, if any one 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 around 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
blind, 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, so 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 cat-naps 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 eyes, 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 how 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.
[Illustration: "TEN FATHOMS DEEP."]
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
any one 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 seal
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 sealskin 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 from 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 were 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 over-head 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
up 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 of
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.
[Illustration: "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 seaweeds; 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 attempts 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 high 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,
where 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 Corientes (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."
That 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 to-night," 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 one another 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.
[Illustration: "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 Cow 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 fore
flipper, 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 playgrounds 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 want only 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 eyes, 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 darted 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 dogteeth 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 one 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, 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 then 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 need a long time to
turn things over in their minds, but year by 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
round him, in that sea where no man comes.