“But you, so young, so intelligent! Not as de Pacific Ocean, hein?”
I allowed there was difference between me and the Pacific. Kreps got his tin cans in, and I put the boat off. Kamelillo was spreading the cat-sail and had no opinion. Veronica came flapping over the rail with a squawk, and lit on Kamelillo, and fell into the bottom of the boat. We got away after the other boats, the night coming on clear, and Kamelillo talked island dialects at Veronica for scratching him when he wanted to be let alone. Kreps sat over his specimens, innocent and happy and singing German lullabies.
The next morning the other boats were not in sight. We steered north, for there were odd islands in that direction by the chart, without names enough to go around them; and on the second morning we saw a high shore to port, with surf like a white rag sewed along the bottom, and rags of mist sticking to the black bluffs.
“Ach,” says Kreps, and the tears trickled down under his spectacles. “Gott sei dank! I am mude of the sea. It iss too large.”
“How she get up them high?” Kamelillo says. “No! Maybe dam hen fly up. Not me. No!”
We coasted by the east side a little way and came to a place where the water was quiet and black in a slip of maybe a hundred feet in width, where the bluff had broken in two. The channel appeared to curve, so that you could only see a little way up. We dropped sail and pulled through. It might have been twenty feet deep in the channel, being high tide, and running in slow. Wine-palms and cocoanut trees grew on the bluffs on each side. Some leaned over, with roots out where the earth had caved away. We came about the curve and saw a closed bay, shut in by the bluffs from the outer sea and even the winds. It was wooded on the north and very rocky on the south, and might have been a quarter of a mile across. We landed on the north side and camped, and set a signal on the bluffs, and then we laid off to wait for accidents. I knew there were whalers cruising in the neighbourhood, and thought likely it would be seen.
Now Liebchen came in one day at high tide, chasing those little goggle-eyed squids that lived so many in the harbour. The first we saw was tons of her gambolling around in the water. She was a medium-sized whale, and might have been forty feet in length, but I never was in the whaling business, and Liebchen was the only one I ever got real acquainted with. I've heard it's common for them to be stranded on shallow shores, and get off again if let alone. The harbour may have been Liebchen's boudoir for aught I know. Maybe she'd come there before. She surely knew how to get out if let alone. After an hour or so she was over by the entrance trying to leave. She seemed to be in trouble, and then we saw the tide had gone out, and left the channel too shallow to heave over.
When Kreps understood that she was penned in, he acted outrageous, and pranced like a red rubber balloon.
“Gieb mir das axe! Ich will de habits of de cetacean studieren!” he says.
He ran away through the woods around the north shore, and I ran after, to see him study the habits of the cetacean. Liebchen had sidled off and was rolling about in the middle of the harbour when we came to the bluffs, where the wine-palms and cocoanut trees leaned over and the channel was narrow. Kreps fell to chopping the landward roots, and I saw he wanted to block the channel.