EPISODE: 15

"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....