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 shoulderpiece 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 Hornback 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.