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.
75