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.