“Well!” said Kotick.  “You’re the only people I’ve ever met uglier than Sea Vitch—­and with worse manners.”

Then he remembered in a flash what the Burgomaster gull had screamed to him when he was a little yearling at Walrus Islet, and he tumbled backward in the water, for he knew that he had found Sea Cow at last.

The sea cows went on schlooping and grazing and chumping in the weed, and Kotick asked them questions in every language that he had picked up in his travels; and the Sea People talk nearly as many languages as human beings.  But the sea cows did not answer because Sea Cow cannot talk.  He has only six bones in his neck where he ought to have seven, and they say under the sea that that prevents him from speaking even to his companions.  But, as you know, he has an extra joint in his foreflipper, and by waving it up and down and about he makes what answers to a sort of clumsy telegraphic code.

By daylight Kotick’s mane was standing on end and his temper was gone where the dead crabs go.  Then the Sea Cow began to travel northward very slowly, stopping to hold absurd bowing councils from time to time, and Kotick followed them, saying to himself, “People who are such idiots as these are would have been killed long ago if they hadn’t found out some safe island.  And what is good enough for the Sea Cow is good enough for the Sea Catch.  All the same, I wish they’d hurry.”

It was weary work for Kotick.  The herd never went more than forty or fifty miles a day, and stopped to feed at night, and kept close to the shore all the time; while Kotick swam round them, and over them, and under them, but he could not hurry them up one-half mile.  As they went farther north they held a bowing council every few hours, and Kotick nearly bit off his mustache with impatience till he saw that they were following up a warm current of water, and then he respected them more.

One night they sank through the shiny water—­sank like stones—­and for the first time since he had known them began to swim quickly.  Kotick followed, and the pace astonished him, for he never dreamed that Sea Cow was anything of a swimmer.  They headed for a cliff by the shore—­a cliff that ran down into deep water, and plunged into a dark hole at the foot of it, twenty fathoms under the sea.  It was a long, long swim, and Kotick badly wanted fresh air before he was out of the dark tunnel they led him through.

“My wig!” he said, when he rose, gasping and puffing, into open water at the farther end.  “It was a long dive, but it was worth it.”

The sea cows had separated and were browsing lazily along the edges of the finest beaches that Kotick had ever seen.  There were long stretches of smooth-worn rock running for miles, exactly fitted to make seal-nurseries, and there were play-grounds of hard sand sloping inland behind them, and there were rollers for seals to dance in, and long grass to roll in, and sand dunes to climb up and down, and, best of all, Kotick knew by the feel of the water, which never deceives a true sea catch, that no men had ever come there.