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.
Lukannon
This is the great deep-sea song that all the St. Paul seals sing when
they are heading back to their beaches in the summer. It is a sort of
very sad seal National Anthem.
I met my mates in the morning (and, oh, but I am old!)
Where roaring on the ledges the summer ground-swell rolled;
I heard them lift the chorus that drowned the breakers song
81