THE WHITE SEAL




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 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 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 have n'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
clamour 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-coloured 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 must n'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.

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 did n'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," said 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."

"Is n'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.

"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: "Is n'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 were n'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
Fog-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 need n'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 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 had n'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 seal 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
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 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 menfolk. 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.





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