The White Seal Part One
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You can't beat a story that has an animal hero who is both intelligent and courageous. The White Seal is an absolute classic of that genre.
Kipling's tale has a very modern theme - it highlights the way in which seals are hunted for their furs. Although Kipling doesn't exactly say that hunting is wrong, you definitely see it from the seal's point of view. There is one passage which you might find a bit graphic, but children will see this as an exciting, and uplifting story. Bertie remembers it as one of his absolute favourite childhood stories.
Every year the male seals fight for a place on the breeding grounds of the beach. Kotick, the White Seal, is born into the family of Sea Catch and Matkah. He is horrified to discover that his fellow seals are hunted for their furs. He is determined to find a place where the seals can live safe from humans.
Alaska near the border with the North East of Russia provides the setting for this story. Oddly enough it's part of the Jungle Book - which is of course otherwise set in India. Some of names in the story are based on Russian, for instance Kotick means "kitten" in Russian.
This longer-than-usual story is in two parts.
Read by Richard Scott. Duration 27.53. Text by Rudyard Kipling.
The White Seal
All these things happened several years ago at a place called
Novastoshnah, or North East Point, on the Island of St. Paul, away and
away in the Bering Sea. Limmershin, the Winter Wren, told me the tale
when he was blown on to the rigging of a steamer going to Japan, and I
took him down into my cabin and warmed and fed him for a couple of days
till he was fit to fly back to St. Paul's again. Limmershin is a very
quaint little bird, but he knows how to tell the truth.
Nobody comes to Novastoshnah except on business, and the only people
who have regular business there are the seals. They come in the summer
months by hundreds and hundreds of thousands out of the cold gray sea.
For Novastoshnah Beach has the finest accommodation for seals of any
place in all the world.
Sea Catch knew that, and every spring would swim from whatever place
he happened to be in--would swim like a torpedo-boat straight for
Novastoshnah and spend a month fighting with his companions for a good
place on the rocks, as close to the sea as possible. Sea Catch was
fifteen years old, a huge gray fur seal with almost a mane on his
shoulders, and long, wicked dog teeth. When he heaved himself up on his
front flippers he stood more than four feet clear of the ground, and his
weight, if anyone had been bold enough to weigh him, was nearly seven
hundred pounds. He was scarred all over with the marks of savage fights,
but he was always ready for just one fight more. He would put his head
on one side, as though he were afraid to look his enemy in the face;
then he would shoot it out like lightning, and when the big teeth were
firmly fixed on the other seal's neck, the other seal might get away if
he could, but Sea Catch would not help him.
Yet Sea Catch never chased a beaten seal, for that was against the Rules
of the Beach. He only wanted room by the sea for his nursery. But as
there were forty or fifty thousand other seals hunting for the same
thing each spring, the whistling, bellowing, roaring, and blowing on the
beach was something frightful.
From a little hill called Hutchinson's Hill, you could look over three
and a half miles of ground covered with fighting seals; and the surf was
dotted all over with the heads of seals hurrying to land and begin their
share of the fighting. They fought in the breakers, they fought in the
sand, and they fought on the smooth-worn basalt rocks of the nurseries,
for they were just as stupid and unaccommodating as men. Their wives
never came to the island until late in May or early in June, for they
did not care to be torn to pieces; and the young two-, three-, and
four-year-old seals who had not begun housekeeping went inland about
half a mile through the ranks of the fighters and played about on the
sand dunes in droves and legions, and rubbed off every single green
thing that grew. They were called the holluschickie--the bachelors--and
there were perhaps two or three hundred thousand of them at Novastoshnah
alone.
Sea Catch had just finished his forty-fifth fight one spring when
Matkah, his soft, sleek, gentle-eyed wife, came up out of the sea,
and he caught her by the scruff of the neck and dumped her down on his
reservation, saying gruffly: "Late as usual. Where have you been?"
It was not the fashion for Sea Catch to eat anything during the four
months he stayed on the beaches, and so his temper was generally bad.
Matkah knew better than to answer back. She looked round and cooed: "How
thoughtful of you. You've taken the old place again."
"I should think I had," said Sea Catch. "Look at me!"
He was scratched and bleeding in twenty places; one eye was almost out,
and his sides were torn to ribbons.
"Oh, you men, you men!" Matkah said, fanning herself with her hind
flipper. "Why can't you be sensible and settle your places quietly? You
look as though you had been fighting with the Killer Whale."
"I haven't been doing anything but fight since the middle of May. The
beach is disgracefully crowded this season. I've met at least a hundred
seals from Lukannon Beach, house hunting. Why can't people stay where
they belong?"
"I've often thought we should be much happier if we hauled out at Otter
Island instead of this crowded place," said Matkah.
"Bah! Only the holluschickie go to Otter Island. If we went there they
would say we were afraid. We must preserve appearances, my dear."
Sea Catch sunk his head proudly between his fat shoulders and pretended
to go to sleep for a few minutes, but all the time he was keeping a
sharp lookout for a fight. Now that all the seals and their wives were
on the land, you could hear their clamor miles out to sea above the
loudest gales. At the lowest counting there were over a million seals
on the beach--old seals, mother seals, tiny babies, and holluschickie,
fighting, scuffling, bleating, crawling, and playing together--going
down to the sea and coming up from it in gangs and regiments, lying
over every foot of ground as far as the eye could reach, and skirmishing
about in brigades through the fog. It is nearly always foggy at
Novastoshnah, except when the sun comes out and makes everything look
all pearly and rainbow-colored for a little while.
Kotick, Matkah's baby, was born in the middle of that confusion, and he
was all head and shoulders, with pale, watery blue eyes, as tiny seals
must be, but there was something about his coat that made his mother
look at him very closely.
"Sea Catch," she said, at last, "our baby's going to be white!"
"Empty clam-shells and dry seaweed!" snorted Sea Catch. "There never has
been such a thing in the world as a white seal."
"I can't help that," said Matkah; "there's going to be now." And she
sang the low, crooning seal song that all the mother seals sing to their
babies:
You mustn't swim till you're six weeks old,
Or your head will be sunk by your heels;
And summer gales and Killer Whales
Are bad for baby seals.
Are bad for baby seals, dear rat,
As bad as bad can be;
But splash and grow strong,
And you can't be wrong.
Child of the Open Sea!
Of course the little fellow did not understand the words at first. He
paddled and scrambled about by his mother's side, and learned to scuffle
out of the way when his father was fighting with another seal, and the
two rolled and roared up and down the slippery rocks. Matkah used to go
to sea to get things to eat, and the baby was fed only once in two days,
but then he ate all he could and throve upon it.
The first thing he did was to crawl inland, and there he met tens
of thousands of babies of his own age, and they played together like
puppies, went to sleep on the clean sand, and played again. The old
people in the nurseries took no notice of them, and the holluschickie
kept to their own grounds, and the babies had a beautiful playtime.
When Matkah came back from her deep-sea fishing she would go straight
to their playground and call as a sheep calls for a lamb, and wait until
she heard Kotick bleat. Then she would take the straightest of straight
lines in his direction, striking out with her fore flippers and knocking
the youngsters head over heels right and left. There were always a few
hundred mothers hunting for their children through the playgrounds, and
the babies were kept lively. But, as Matkah told Kotick, "So long as you
don't lie in muddy water and get mange, or rub the hard sand into a cut
or scratch, and so long as you never go swimming when there is a heavy
sea, nothing will hurt you here."
Little seals can no more swim than little children, but they are unhappy
till they learn. The first time that Kotick went down to the sea a wave
carried him out beyond his depth, and his big head sank and his little
hind flippers flew up exactly as his mother had told him in the song,
and if the next wave had not thrown him back again he would have
drowned.
After that, he learned to lie in a beach pool and let the wash of the
waves just cover him and lift him up while he paddled, but he always
kept his eye open for big waves that might hurt. He was two weeks
learning to use his flippers; and all that while he floundered in and
out of the water, and coughed and grunted and crawled up the beach and
took catnaps on the sand, and went back again, until at last he found
that he truly belonged to the water.
Then you can imagine the times that he had with his companions, ducking
under the rollers; or coming in on top of a comber and landing with a
swash and a splutter as the big wave went whirling far up the beach; or
standing up on his tail and scratching his head as the old people did;
or playing "I'm the King of the Castle" on slippery, weedy rocks that
just stuck out of the wash. Now and then he would see a thin fin, like
a big shark's fin, drifting along close to shore, and he knew that that
was the Killer Whale, the Grampus, who eats young seals when he can get
them; and Kotick would head for the beach like an arrow, and the fin
would jig off slowly, as if it were looking for nothing at all.
Late in October the seals began to leave St. Paul's for the deep sea, by
families and tribes, and there was no more fighting over the nurseries,
and the holluschickie played anywhere they liked. "Next year," said
Matkah to Kotick, "you will be a holluschickie; but this year you must
learn how to catch fish."
They set out together across the Pacific, and Matkah showed Kotick how
to sleep on his back with his flippers tucked down by his side and his
little nose just out of the water. No cradle is so comfortable as the
long, rocking swell of the Pacific. When Kotick felt his skin tingle all
over, Matkah told him he was learning the "feel of the water," and that
tingly, prickly feelings meant bad weather coming, and he must swim hard
and get away.
"In a little time," she said, "you'll know where to swim to, but just
now we'll follow Sea Pig, the Porpoise, for he is very wise." A school
of porpoises were ducking and tearing through the water, and little
Kotick followed them as fast as he could. "How do you know where to go
to?" he panted. The leader of the school rolled his white eye and ducked
under. "My tail tingles, youngster," he said. "That means there's a gale
behind me. Come along! When you're south of the Sticky Water [he meant
the Equator] and your tail tingles, that means there's a gale in front
of you and you must head north. Come along! The water feels bad here."
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 shoulder-piece 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!"
And that’s the end of the first part of the White Seal by Rudyard Kipling. I do hope that you are enjoying the story, and I’ll be a back very soon to let you know if Kotick manages to find the place where the seals can live safe and sound away from the hunters.