IV. FLAPPER THE FUR SEAL

IT was “sink or swim” for Finny-Foot,—and it was a long swim to the point of rock he had seen.

He had almost given up, when the tide turned and carried him right toward it. But where was his mother, and the others he had left? Here was no sound of barking seals, though over on the yellow ribbon of beach sand the wee sandpipers ran up and down with the waves, just as they had at Monterey, and the gulls creaked and curveted overhead.

“I want to go home!” wept Finny-Foot, in his voice like a human baby’s wail. But the only answer he received was the slap of the waves against his rock and the creak of gulls overhead.

He caught a fish and ate it before he hid himself in a cranny of the rocks to take a nap. He awoke to an ocean deep blue under the California sun, and a cloudless sky that seemed to bend down to meet it everywhere except where the beach met the never-ending waves with its yellow sand dunes. He caught another fish, and took another nap, and when he awoke this time he felt much better.

He was just wondering if he could find Seal Rocks if he were to swim along close to shore, when he spied the up-standing fins of a band of killer whales. They were far out at sea, but he remembered what had happened to the seal colony when the killers had pursued them, and for days afterward he dared not make the venture.

Then one morning, when the sea was calm, he sighted a big rock shining black and wet, further down the coast, and swam for it. This rock was even better for basking in the sunshine and diving for passing fish. But it was not home, and Finny-Foot was even lonelier now than he had been with Pietro. Again and again he started swimming further South, where he seemed to feel that home ought to be. But always he saw sharks, and had to hide himself behind the nearest rock. Sometimes, too, after a long, tiring swim, he failed to find a good fishing ground and had to go hungry to sleep. Then he came to another town, where he was afraid to go too close to shore, and waited long days on a point of rock that looked far out to sea. There were always plenty of fish, but would he have to live all his life alone?

One day he saw a sleek dark form swimming just off shore. Now Finny-Foot’s own family, like all harbor seals the world over, were gray spotted when full grown. But the newcomer was a rich dark brown and ever so much larger. Still, Finny knew he was a seal by the way he swam, and himself swam out to greet him.

The visitor proved to be an Alaska fur seal, a young fellow who had migrated South with the other fur seals, but who had been wounded by a shark and had to go ashore till his wound was healed. He told Finny-Foot of that land of ice and snow where his own colony made its home. Finny-Foot decided that it must be the need of keeping warm so near the North Pole that gave him such wonderful fur, for he would need it there to keep him from freezing.

There were millions of them where Flapper the Fur Seal came from. Every spring, he said, they started North, after a winter along the coast of Canada and as far South as Northern California. Often for days and weeks at a time they had to swim through a sea that was beaten into giant waves by the storm winds. Often rain and snow and sleet pommeled the sea all about them, and the sky hung low and gray with clouds, and they could hardly see for the gray fog that hung over everything. Sometimes they had to dodge between drifting ice-bergs that roared and cracked in the most terrific manner. Sometimes a storm would raise the waves so high that they were nearly drowned.

But at last, just in time for the short Alaskan summer, they would reach the small, fog-hidden Pribilof Islands, where the mother seals, hundreds of them together, would raise their babies. The fish are so plentiful that the season is one long feast.

The fur seal babies are a woolly black. And here the seal youngsters would play like puppies, racing and tumbling about together with their funny, awkward flappers, diving and swimming and leaping from the water, all in the merriest way imaginable.

But even there the killer whales pursued them. Then, too, there were men who killed them for their fur, (Flapper said). There were great white polar bears who tried to catch them, and Eskimos and Indians, who kill them both for food and fur, so that a fur seal has to be continually on the alert.

But all this danger and hardship had made Flapper unusually well able to take care of himself, and he thought that if Finny-Foot wanted to come along, they ought to be able to keep out of harm’s way until they found the little colony off Monterey. He himself, thought Flapper, ought now to wait until he saw some band of migrants returning to Alaska, and join them for the two thousand mile journey home.

Finny-Foot invited him to join the colony at Monterey, but Flapper said the warm climate was beginning to make him feel itchy in his heavy furs, and if he did not find his people within a few days more, he was going to swim back North by himself, at least as far as Canada.

One curious thing he told Finny-Foot. Instead of each family having just one mother, as harbor seals did, there in Alaska a family might have a hundred mothers all bringing up their children on the same rocky islet. But that was because of several reasons. First, so many things happened to the more adventurous father seals, who had to fight off intruders, that often there weren’t enough to go around. Then the bull seal is so large, (four or five times as large as his mates), that he can easily protect a whole colony of mothers and babies.

Finny-Foot thought he would much prefer to have the kind of families his own colony believed in. But then, of course, everything is so different in Alaska, where it means a struggle just to keep alive, that he supposed it must be necessary.

One day he and Flapper had been playing together, Flapper leaping high above the water in great, glistening curves that Finny-Foot could not begin to imitate, when Flapper gave a bark of amazement. There, on a cluster of rocks in a curving harbor, above which the gulls creaked and curveted as they watched for fish, he could see a number of gray objects moving awkwardly about or diving into the tide.

“Look!” he urged Finny-Foot. “I’ll bet that’s your colony!” But the little seal could not see. “Come on, let’s find out!” Flapper urged, almost as glad as if it had been his own people that he had found. And sure enough, there on the very rock on which Finny-Foot had spent his babyhood, a snow white pup, he saw his gray spotted mother, all alone.

Just at first she did not recognize him, for he had grown so large and had turned gray spotted like herself. When she did realize that it was her son, whom she had given up for gone, she barked so joyously that every member of the colony came crowding around them, barking their welcome to him.

(THE END.)