Kings in Exile

It was certainly an improvement on the black hole from which he had just escaped. Light came down through the clear water, but a cold, white light, little like the green and gold glimmer that illumined the slow tide in his Caribbean home. The floor about him was not wholly unfamiliar. The stones, the sand, the colored weeds, the shells, – they were like, yet unlike, those from which he had been snatched away. But on three sides there were white, opaque walls, so near that he could have touched them by stretching out a tentacle. Only on the fourth side was there space – but a space of gloom and inexplicable moving confusion from which he shrank. In this direction the floor of sand and stones and weeds ended with a mysterious abruptness; and the vague openness beyond filled him with uneasiness. Pale-colored shapes, with eyes, would drift up, sometimes in crowds, and stare in at him fixedly. It daunted him as nothing else had ever done, this drift of peering faces. It was long before he could teach himself to ignore them. When food came to him, – small fish and crabs, descending suddenly from the top of the water, – at such times the faces would throng tumultuously in that open space, and for a long time the many peering eyes would so disconcert him as almost to spoil his appetite. But at last he grew accustomed even to the faces and the eyes, and disregarded them as if they were so much passing seaweed, borne by the tide. His investigating tentacles had shown him that between him and the space of confusion there was an incomprehensible barrier fixed, which he could see through but not pass; and that if he could not get out, neither could the faces get in to trouble him.

Thus, well fed and undisturbed, the octopus grew fairly content in his glass house, and never guessed the stormy life of the great city beyond his walls. For all he knew, his comfortable prison might have been on the shore of one of his own Bahaman Keys. He was undisputed lord of his domain, narrow though it was; and the homage he received from the visitors who came to pay him court was untiring.

His lordship had been long unthreatened, when one day, had he not been too indifferent to notice them, he might have seen that the faces in the outer gloom were unusually numerous, the eyes unusually intent. Suddenly there was the accustomed splash in the water above him. That splash had come to him to mean just food, unresisting victims, and his tentacles were instantly alert to seize whatever should come within reach.

This time the splash was unusually heavy, and he was surprised to see a massive, roundish creature, with a little, pointed tail sticking out behind, a small, snake-like head stretched out in front, and two little flippers outspread on each side. With these four flippers the stranger came swimming down calmly towards him. He had never seen anything at all like this daring stranger; but without the slightest hesitation he whipped up two writhing tentacles and seized him. The faces beyond the glass surged with excitement.

When that abrupt and uncompromising clutch laid hold upon the turtle, his tail, head, and flippers vanished as if they had never been, and his upper and lower shells closed tight together till he seemed nothing more than a lifeless box of horn. Absolutely unresisting, he was drawn down to the impassive eyes and gaping beak of his captor. The tentacles writhed all over him, stealthily but eagerly investigating. Then the great parrot-beak laid hold on the shell, expecting to crush it. Making no impression, however, it slid tentatively all over the exasperating prize, seeking, but in vain, for a weak point.

This went on for several minutes, while the watching faces outside the glass gazed in tense expectancy. Then at last the patience of the octopus gave way. In a sudden fury he threw himself upon the exasperating shell, tumbling it over and over, biting at it madly, wrenching it insanely with all his tentacles. And the faces beyond the glass surged thrillingly, wondering how long the turtle would stand such treatment.

Shut up within his safe armor, the turtle all at once grew tired of being tumbled about, and his wise discretion forsook him. He did not mind being shut up, but he objected to being knocked about. Some prudence he had, to be sure, but not enough to control his short temper. Out shot his narrow, vicious-looking head, with its dull eyes and punishing jaws, and fastened with the grip of a bulldog upon the nearest of the tentacles, close to its base. A murmur arose outside the glass.

The rage of the octopus swelled to a frenzy, and in his contortions the locked fighters bumped heavily against the glass, making the faces shrink back. The small stones on the bottom were scattered this way and that, and the fine silt rose in a cloud that presently obscured the battle.

Had the turtle had cunning to match his courage, the lordship of the glass house might have changed holders in that fight. Had he fixed his unbreakable grip in the head of his foe, just above the beak, he would have conquered in the end. But as it was, he had now a vulnerable point, and at last the octopus found it. His beak closed upon the exposed half of the turtle’s head, and slowly, inexorably, sheared it clean off just behind the eyes. The stump shrank instantly back into the shell; and the shell became again the unresisting plaything of the tentacles, which presently, as if realizing that it had no more power to retaliate, flung it aside. In a few minutes the silt settled. Then the eager faces beyond the glass saw the lord of the tank crouching motionless before his lair, his ink-like eyes as impassive and implacable as ever, while the turtle lay bottom side up against the glass, no more to be taken account of than a stone.

BACK TO THE WATER WORLD

CHAPTER I

An iron coast, bleak, black, and desolate, without harborage for so much as a catboat for leagues to north or south. A coast so pitiless, so lashed forever by the long, sullen rollers of the North Atlantic, so tormented by the shifting and treacherous currents of the tide between its chains of outlying rocky islets, that no ship ever ventured willingly within miles of its uncompromising menace. A coast so little favored by summer that even in glowing August the sun could reach it seldom through its cold and drenching fogs.

Perhaps half a mile off shore lay the islands – some of them, indeed, mere ledges, deathtraps for ships, invisible except at low tide, but others naked hills of upthrust rock, which the highest tides and wildest hurricanes could not overwhelm. Even on the loftiest of them there was neither grass, bush, nor tree to break the jagged outlines, but day and night, summer and winter long, the sea-birds clamored over them, and brooded by the myriad on their upper ledges.

These islands were fretted, on both their landward and their seaward sides, by innumerable caves. In one of these caves, above the reach of the highest tide, and facing landward, so that even in the wildest storms no waves could invade it, the pup of the seal first opened his mild eyes upon the misty northern daylight.

Of all the younglings of the wild, he was perhaps the most winsome, with his soft, whitish, shadowy-toned, close, woolly coat, his round, babyish head, his dark, gentle eyes wide with wonder at everything to be seen from the cave mouth. He lay usually very near the entrance, but partly hidden from view by a ragged horn of rock. While alone – which was a good part of the time, indeed, like most fishermen’s children – he would lie so still that his woolly little form was hardly to be distinguished from the rock that formed his couch. He had no desire to attract public attention – for the only public that might have been attracted to attend consisted of the pair of great sea eagles whose shadows sometimes swooped aross the ledge, or of an occasional southward-wandering white bear. As for the innumerable gulls, and gannets, and terns, and lesser auks, which made the air forever loud about these lonely islets, nothing could have induced them to pay him any attention whatever. They knew him, and his people, to be harmless; and that was all their winged and garrulous companies were concerned to know.

But to the little seal, on the other hand, the noisy birds were incessantly interesting. Filled with insatiable curiosity, his mild eyes gazed out upon the world. The sea just below the cave was, of course, below his line of vision; but at a distance of some hundred yards or so – a distance which varied hugely with the rising and falling of the tide – he caught sight of the waves, and felt himself strangely drawn to them. Whether leaden and menacing under the drift of rain and the brooding of gray clouds, or green-glinting under the sheen of too rare sunshine, he loved them and found them always absorbing. The sky, too, was worth watching, especially when white fleeces chased each other across a patch of blue, or wonderful colors, pallid yet intense, shot up into it at dawn from behind a far-off line of saw-toothed rocks.

The absences of the mother seal were sometimes long, for it required many fish to satisfy her appetite and keep warm her red blood in those ice-cold arctic currents. Fish were abundant, to be sure, along that coast, where the invisible fruitfulness of the sea made compensation for the blank barrenness of the land; but they were swift and wary, and had to be caught, one at a time, outwitted and outspeeded in their own element. The woolly cub, therefore, was often hungry before his mother returned. But when, at last, she came, flopping awkwardly up the rocky slope, and pausing for an instant to reconnoitre, as her round, glistening head appeared over the brink of the ledge, the youngster’s delight was not all in the satisfying of his hunger and in the mothering of his loneliness. As he snuggled under her caress, the salty drip from her wet, sleek sides thrilled him with a dim sense of anticipation. He connected it vaguely with that endless, alluring dance of the waves beyond his threshold.

When he had grown a few days older, the little seal began to turn his attention from the brighter world outside to the shadows that surrounded him in his cave. His interest was caught at once by a woolly gray creature like himself, only somewhat smaller, which lay perhaps seven or eight feet away, at the other side of the cave, and farther back. He had not realized before that his narrow retreat was the home of two families. Being of a companionable disposition, he eyed his newly discovered neighbor with immense good-will. Finding no discouragement in the mild gaze that answered his, he presently raised himself on his flippers, and with laborious, ungainly effort flopped himself over to make acquaintance. Both youngsters were too unsophisticated for ceremony, too trusting for shyness, so in a very few minutes they were sprawling over each other in great content.

In this baby comradeship the stranger’s mother, returning to her household duties, found them. She was smaller and younger than our Pup’s dam, but with the same kindly eyes and the same salty-dripping coat. So, when her own baby fell to nursing, the Pup insisted confidently on sharing the entertainment. The young mother protested, and drew herself away uneasily, with little threatening grunts; but the Pup, refusing to believe she was in earnest, pressed his point so pertinaciously that at length he got his way. When, half an hour later, the other mother returned to her charge, well filled with fish and well disposed toward all the world, she showed no discontent at the situation. She belonged to the tribe of the “Harbor Seals,” and, unlike her pugnacious cousins, the big “Hoods,” she was always inclined towards peace and a good understanding. There was probably nothing that could have brought the flame of wrath into her confiding eyes, except an attack upon her young, on whose behalf she would have faced the sea-serpent himself. Without a moment’s question, she joined the group; and henceforth the cave was the seat of a convenient partnership in mothers.

It was perhaps a week or two later, when the islands were visited by a wonderful spell of sun and calm. It was what would have been called, farther south, Indian summer. All along the ledges, just above the mark of the diminished surf, the seals lay basking in the glow. The gulls and mews clamored rapturously, and squabbled with gay zest over the choicer prizes of their fishing. It appeared to be generally known that the bears, displeased at the warmth, had withdrawn farther north. The sea took on strange hues of opal and lilac and thrice-diluted sapphire. Even the high black cliffs across the charmed water veiled their harshness in a skyey haze. It was a time for delicious indolence, for the slackening of vigilance, for the forgetfulness of peril. And it was just at this very time that it came the young seal’s way to get his first lesson in fear.

He was lying beside his mother, about a dozen feet out from the mouth of the cave. A few steps away basked his little cave-mate – alone for the moment, because its mother had flung herself vehemently down the slope to capture a wounded fish which had just been washed ashore. As she reached the water’s edge, a wide shadow floated across the rocks. She wheeled like a flash and scrambled frantically up the steep. But she was too late. She saw the other mothers near by throw their bodies over those of their young, and lift their faces skyward with bared, defiant fangs. She saw her own little one, alone in the bright open, gaze around in helpless bewilderment and alarm. He saw her coming, and lifting himself on his weak flippers, started towards her with a little cry. Then came a terrible hissing of wings in the air above, and he cowered, trembling. The next instant, with a huge buffet of wind in all the upturned faces, a pair of vast, dark pinions were outspread above the trembler; great clutching talons reached down and seized him by neck and back; and his tiny life went out in a throttled whimper. The nearest seal, the mother of the Pup, reared on her flippers and lunged savagely at the marauder. But all she got was a blinding slash of rigid wing-tips across her face. Then, launching himself from the brink of the slope, the eagle flapped scornfully away across the water toward the black cliffs, his victim hanging limply from his claws. And all along the ledges the seals barked furiously after him.

The Pup, whom death had brushed so closely, could not be persuaded for hours to leave the shelter of his mother’s side, even after she had led him back to the cave. But now he found himself the exclusive proprietor of two mothers; for the bereaved dam, thenceforth, was no less assiduously devoted to him than his own parent. With such care, and with so abundant nourishment, he throve amazingly, outstripping in growth all the other youngsters of his age along the ledges. His terror quickly passed away from him; but the results of the lesson long remained, in the vigilance with which his glance would sweep the sky, and question every approach of wings more wide than those of gull or gannet.

It was not long after this grim chance that the Pup’s woolly coat began to change. A straight, close-lying under-fur pushed swiftly into view, and the wool dropped out – a process which a certain sense of irritation in his skin led him to hasten by rubbing his back and sides against the rock. In an astonishingly short time his coat grew like his mother’s – a yellowish gray, dotted irregularly with blackish spots, and running to a creamy tone under the belly. As soon as this change was completed to his mother’s satisfaction, he was led down close to the water’s edge, where he had never been allowed before.

Eagerly as he loved the sight of the waves, and the salty savor of them, when the first thin crest splashed up and soused him he shrank back daunted. It was colder, too, that first slap in his face, than he had expected. He turned, intending to retreat a little way up the rocks and consider the question, in spite of the fact that there was his little mother in the water, swimming gayly a few feet out from shore and coaxing him with soft cries. He was anxious to join her – but not just yet. Then, all at once the question was decided for him. His real mother, who was just behind him, suddenly thrust her muzzle under his flank, and sent him rolling into deep water.

He came up at once, much startled. Straightway he found that he could move in the water much more easily and naturally than on shore – and he applied the discovery to getting ashore again with all possible haste. But his mother, awaiting him at the edge, shoved him off relentlessly.

Feeling much injured, he turned and swam out to his other mother. Here the first one joined him; and in a few minutes amazement and resentment alike were lost in delight, as he began to realize that this, at last, was life. Here, and not sprawling half helplessly on the rocks, was where he belonged. He swam, and dived, and darted like a fish, and went wild with childish ecstasy. He had come to his own element. After this, he hardly ever returned to the cave, but slept close at the side of one or the other of his mothers, on the open rocks just a few feet above the edge of tide.

A little later came a period of mad weather, ushering in the autumn storms. Snow and sleet drove down out of the north, and lay in great patches over the more level portions of the islets above tide. The wind seemed as if it would lift the islets bodily and sweep them away. The vast seas, green and black and lead-color, thundered down upon the rocks as if they would batter them to fragments. The ledges shuddered under the incessant crashing. When the snow stopped, on its heels came the vanguard of the arctic cold. The ice formed instantly in all the pools left by the tide. Along the edges of the tide it was ground to a bitter slush by the perpetual churning of the waves.

After a week or two of this violence, the seals – who, unlike their polar cousins, the “Harps” and the “Hoods,” were no great lovers of storm and the fiercer cold – began to feel discontented. Presently a little party of them, not more than a score in all, with a few of the stronger youngsters of that season, on a sudden impulse left their stormy ledges and started southward. The Pup, who, thanks to his double mothering, was far bigger and more capable than any of his mates, went with his partner-mothers in the very forefront of the migration.

Straight down along the roaring coast they kept, usually at a distance of not more than half a mile from shore. They had, of course, no objection to going farther out, but neither had they any object in doing so, since the fish-life on which they fed as they journeyed was the more abundant where the sea began to shoal. With their slim, sleek, rounded bodies, thickest at the fore flippers and tapering finely to tail and muzzle, each a lithe and close-knit structure of muscle and nerve-energy, they could swim with astounding speed; and therefore, although there was no hurry whatever, they went along at the pace of a motor-boat.

All this time the gale was lashing the coast, but it gave them little concern. Down in the black troughs of the gigantic rollers there was always peace from the yelling of the wind – a tranquillity wherein the gulls and mews would snatch their rest after being buffeted too long about the sky. Near the tops of the waves, of course, it was not good to be, for the gale would rip the crests off bodily and tear them into shreds of whipping spray. But the seals could always dive and slip smoothly under these tormented regions. Moreover, if weary of the tossing surfaces and the tumult of the gale, they had only to sink themselves down, down, into the untroubled gloom beneath the wave-bases, where greenish lights gleamed or faded with the passing of the rollers overhead, and where strange, phosphorescent shapes of life crawled or clung among the silent rocks. Longer than any other red-blooded animal, except the whale, could their lungs go without fresh oxygen; so, though they knew nothing of those great depths where the whales sometimes frequent, it was easy for them to go deep enough to get below the storm.

Sometimes a break in the coast-line, revealing the mouth of an inlet, would tempt the little band of migrants. Hastening shoreward, they would push their way inland between the narrowing banks, often as far as the head of tide, gambolling in the quiet water, and chasing the salmon fairly out upon the shoals. Like most discriminating creatures, they were very fond of salmon, but it was rarely, except on such occasions as this, that they had a chance to gratify their taste.

After perhaps a week of this southward journeying, the travellers found themselves one night at the head of a little creek where the tide lapped pleasantly on a smooth, sandy beach. They were already getting into milder weather, and here, a half mile inland, there was no wind. The sky was overcast, and the seals lay in contented security along the edge of the water. The blacker darkness of a fir forest came down to within perhaps fifty paces of their resting-place. But they had no anxieties. The only creatures that they had learned to fear on shore besides man were the polar bears; and they knew they were now well south of that deadly hunter’s range. As for eagles, they did not hunt at night; and, moreover, they were a terror only in the woolly-coated, baby stage of a seal’s existence.

But it often enough happens that wild animals, no less than human beings, may be ignorant of something which their health requires them to know. There was another bear in Labrador – a smallish, rusty-coated, broad-headed, crafty cousin of the ordinary American black bear. And one of these, who had acquired a taste for seal, along with some cleverness in gratifying that taste, had his headquarters, as it chanced, in that near-neighboring fir wood.

The Pup lay crowded in snugly between his two mothers. He liked the warmth of being crowded; for the light breeze, drawing up from the water, was sharp with frost. There is such a thing, however, as being just a little too crowded, and presently, waking up with a protest, he pushed and wriggled to get more space. As he did so, he raised his head. His keen young eyes fell upon a black something a little blacker than the surrounding gloom.

The black something was up the slope halfway between the water and the wood. It looked like a mass of rock. But the Pup had a vague feeling that there had been no rock thereabouts when he went to sleep. A thrill of apprehension went up and down his spine, raising the stiffish hairs along his neck. Staring with all his eyes through the dimness, he presently saw the black shape move. Yes, it was drawing nearer. With a shrill little bark of terror he gave the alarm, at the same time struggling free and hurling himself toward the water.

In that same instant the bear rushed, coming down the slope as it were in one plunging jump. The seals, light sleepers all, were already awake and floundering madly back to the water. But for one of them, and that one the Pup’s assistant mother, the alarm came too late. Just as she was turning, bewildered with terror of she knew not what, the dark bulk of the bear landed upon her, crushing her down. A terrific blow on the muzzle broke her skull, and she collapsed into a quivering mass. The rest of the band, after a moment of loud splashing, swam off noiselessly for the safe retreat of the outer ledges. And the bear, after shaking the body of his victim to make sure it was quite dead, dragged it away with a grunt of satisfaction into the fir wood.

After this tragedy, though the travellers continued to ascend the creeks and inlets when the whim so moved them, they took care to choose for sleep the ruder security of outlying rocks and islands, and cherished, by night and by day, a wholesome distrust of dark fir woods. But for all their watchfulness their journeying was care-free and joyous, and from time to time, as they went, their light-heartedness would break out into aimless gambols, or something very like a children’s game of tag. Nothing, however, checked their progress southward, and presently, turning into the Belle Isle Straits, they came to summer skies and softer weather. At this point, under the guidance of an old male who had followed the southward track before, they forsook the Labrador shore-line and headed fearlessly out across the strait till they reached the coast of Newfoundland. This coast they followed westward till they gained the Gulf of St. Lawrence, then, turning south, worked their way down the southwest coast of the great Island Province, past shores still basking in the amethystine light of Indian summer, through seas so teeming with fish that they began to grow lazy with fatness. Here the Pup and other younger members of the company felt inclined to stay. But their elders knew that winter, with the long cold, and the scanty sun, and the perilous grinding of tortured ice-floes around the shore-rocks, would soon be upon them; so the journey was continued. On they pressed, across the wide gateway of the Gulf, from Cape Ray to North Cape, the eastern point of Nova Scotia. Good weather still waited upon their wayfaring, and they loitered onward gayly, till, arriving at the myriad-islanded bay of the Tuskets, near the westernmost tip of the peninsula, they could not, for sheer satisfaction, go farther. Here was safe seclusion, with countless inaccessible retreats. Here was food in exhaustless plenty; and here was weather benignant enough for any reasonable needs.