“Withdrawing his terrible weapon, the robber fish whirled about like lightning and made a second dash at the coveted prize.  But the mother, holding the little one tight under her flipper, wheeled again in time to intercept the attack, and again received the dreadful thrust in her own flank.  So swift was the swordfish (he was a kind of giant mackerel, with all the mackerel’s grace and fire and nimbleness) that he seemed to be everywhere at once.  The whale was kept spinning around in a dizzy circle of foam, like a whirlpool, with the bewildered calf on the inside.  The mighty twisting thrusts of her tail, with its flukes twenty feet wide, set the whole surface boiling for hundreds of yards about.

“At last, grown suddenly frantic with rage, with terror for her little one, and with the pain of her wounds, the tormented mother broke into a deep booming bellow, as of a hundred bulls.  The mysterious sound sent all the gulls screaming into the air, and frightened the basking walruses on the ledges three miles away.  Every seal that heard it shuddered and dived, and an old white bear, prowling along the desolate beach in search of dead fish, lifted his lean head and listened nervously.

“Only the swordfish paid no attention to that tremendous and desperate cry.  In the midst of it he made another rush, missed the calf by a handbreadth, and buried his sword to the socket in the mother’s side.

“At this the old whale seemed to lose her wits.  Still clutching the terrified calf under one flipper, she stood straight on her head, so that the head and half her body were below the surface, and fell to lashing the water all around her with ponderous, deafening blows of her tail.  The huge concussions drove the swordfish from the surface, and for a minute or two he swam around her in a wide circle, about twenty feet down, trying to get the hang of these queer tactics.  Then, swift and smooth as a shadow, he shot in diagonally, well below the range of those crashing strokes.  His sword went clean through the body of the calf, through its heart, killing it instantly, and at the same time forcing it from its mother’s hold.  The lifeless but still quivering form fixed thus firmly on his sword, he darted away with it, and was instantly lost to view beyond the dense, churned hosts of the pink shrimps.

“For perhaps a minute the mother, as if bewildered by the violence of her own exertions, seemed quite unaware of what had happened.  At length she stopped lashing the water, came slowly to the surface stared about her in a dazed way, and once more bellowed forth her terrible booming cry.  Once more the seabirds sprang terrified to the upper air, and the old white bear on the far-off shore lifted his head once more to listen nervously.”

“And she never saw her baby any more,” murmured the Babe mournfully.

Uncle Andy snorted, disdaining to answer such a remark.

“Oh, I wish somebody would do something to that swordfish,” continued the Babe.  And he wiped a tear from his nose.