roar of the rookery. "If you say so, I'll turn and go
back; but honestly, I'd rather stay."

"Now don't say that this is what you get for bringing a woman along," she
said. She smiled at me whimsically, gloriously, and I knew there was no
need for forgiveness.

I rowed a couple of hundred feet along the beach so as to recover my
nerves, and then stepped ashore again.

"Do be cautious," she called after me.

I nodded my head and proceeded to make a flank attack on the nearest
harem. All went well until I aimed a blow at an outlying cowls head and
fell short. She snorted and tried to scramble away. I ran in close and
struck another blow, hitting the shoulder instead of the head.

"Watch out!" I heard Maud scream.

In my excitement I had not been taking notice of other things, and I
looked up to see the lord of the harem charging down upon me. Again I
fled to the boat, hotly pursued; but this time Maud made no suggestion of
turning back.

"It would be better, I imagine, if you let harems alone and devoted your
attention to lonely and inoffensive-looking seals," was what she said.
"I think I have read something about them. Dr. Jordan's book, I believe.
They are the young bulls, not old enough to have harems of their own. He
called them the holluschickie, or something like that. It seems to me if
we find where they haul out--"

"It seems to me that your fighting instinct is aroused," I laughed.

She flushed quickly and prettily. "I'll admit I don't like defeat any
more than you do, or any more than I like the idea of killing such
pretty, inoffensive creatures."

"Pretty!" I sniffed. "I failed to mark anything pre-eminently pretty
about those foamy-mouthed beasts that raced me."

"Your point of view," she laughed. "You lacked perspective. Now if you
did not have to get so close to the subject--"

"The very thing!" I cried. "What I need is a longer club. And there's
that broken oar ready to hand."

"It just comes to me," she said, "that Captain Larsen was telling me how
the men raided the rookeries. They drive the seals, in small herds, a
short distance inland before they kill them."

"I don't care to undertake the herding of one of those harems," I
objected.

"But there are the holluschickie," she said. "The holluschickie haul out
by themselves, and Dr. Jordan says that paths are left between the
harems, and that as long as the holluschickie keep strictly to the path
they are unmolested by