EPISODE: 14

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."....