The Jungle Book
by Rudyard Kipling
Ch. 5: Mowgli's Song
THAT HE SANG AT THE COUNCIL ROCK WHEN HE
DANCED ON SHERE KHAN'S HIDE
The Song of Mowgli—I, Mowgli, am
singing. Let the jungle
listen to the things I have done.
Shere Khan said he would kill—would
kill! At the gates in the
twilight he would kill Mowgli, the
Frog!
He ate and he drank. Drink deep, Shere Khan, for when wilt thou
drink again? Sleep and dream of the kill.
I am alone on the grazing-grounds. Gray Brother, come to me!
Come to me, Lone Wolf, for there is big
game afoot!
Bring up the great bull buffaloes, the
blue-skinned herd bulls
with the angry eyes. Drive them to and fro as I order.
Sleepest thou still, Shere Khan? Wake, oh, wake! Here come I,
and the bulls are behind.
Rama, the King of the Buffaloes, stamped
with his foot. Waters of
the Waingunga, whither went Shere Khan?
He is not Ikki to dig holes, nor Mao, the
Peacock, that he should
fly.
He is not Mang the Bat, to hang in the branches. Little
bamboos that creak together, tell me
where he ran?
Ow!
He is there. Ahoo! He is there.
Under the feet of Rama
lies the Lame One! Up, Shere Khan!
Up and kill! Here is meat; break the necks of the bulls!
Hsh!
He is asleep. We will not wake
him, for his strength is
very great. The kites have come down to see it. The black
ants have come up to know it. There is a great assembly in his
honor.
Alala!
I have no cloth to wrap me. The
kites will see that I am
naked.
I am ashamed to meet all these people.
Lend me thy coat, Shere Khan. Lend me thy gay striped coat that I
may go to the Council Rock.
By the Bull that bought me I made a
promise—a little promise.
Only thy coat is lacking before I keep
my word.
With the knife, with the knife that men
use, with the knife of the
hunter, I will stoop down for my gift.
Waters of the Waingunga, Shere Khan gives
me his coat for the love
that he bears me. Pull, Gray Brother! Pull, Akela!
Heavy is
the hide of Shere Khan.
The Man Pack are angry. They throw stones and talk child's talk.
My mouth is bleeding. Let me run away.
Through the night, through the hot night,
run swiftly with me, my
brothers. We will leave the lights of the village and
go to
the low moon.
Waters of the Waingunga, the Man-Pack have
cast me out. I did
them no harm, but they were afraid of
me. Why?
Wolf Pack, ye have cast me out too. The jungle is shut to me and
the village gates are shut. Why?
As Mang flies between the beasts and
birds, so fly I between the
village and the jungle. Why?
I dance on the hide of Shere Khan, but my
heart is very heavy. My
mouth is cut and wounded with the
stones from the village, but
my heart is very light, because I have
come back to the jungle.
Why?
These two things fight together in me as
the snakes fight in the
spring.
The water comes out of my eyes; yet I laugh while it
falls.
Why?
I am
two Mowglis, but the hide of Shere Khan is under my feet.
All the jungle knows that I have killed
Shere Khan. Look—look
well, O Wolves!
Ahae!
My heart is heavy with the things that I do not understand.
The Jungle Book
by Rudyard Kipling
Ch. 6: The White Seal
Oh! hush thee, my baby, the night is
behind us,
And black are the waters that sparkled
so green.
The moon, o'er the combers, looks downward
to find us
At rest in the hollows that rustle
between.
Where billow meets billow, then soft be
thy pillow,
Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy
ease!
The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark
overtake thee,
Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging
seas!
Seal Lullaby
"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, 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."
"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 thousands of miles out of the Pacific
and got to a place called Cape Corrientes (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."
This 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
tonight," 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 each other 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.
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 cows 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
foreflipper, 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 play-grounds 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 only want 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 eye, 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 was 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 a 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 with 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 when there were none
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 are not very clever, and they need a
long time to turn things over in their minds, but year after 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 around
him, in that sea where no man comes.
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