ly 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 hollusc