The Jungle Book
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