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
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