"No, sir," answered the old whaler, after shouting a loud "Ahoy!" to which but one answer was returned, "but we'll see her, likely, when the fog lifts."
"Doesn't lift much here," the captain said. "But with this offshore wind, they ought to hear the seals three or four miles away."
In the meantime the whale-boat was forging through the water slowly and the noise of the seals grew louder every minute. The sun was rising, but the fog was so dense that it was barely possible to tell which was the east.
"Funny kind of fog," said Colin; "seems to me it's about as wet as the water!"
"Reg'lar seal fog," Hank replied. "If it wasn't always foggy the seals wouldn't haul out here, an' anyway, there's always a lot of fog
around a rookery. Must be the breath of so many thousands o' seals, I reckon."
Spearing Seals at Sea.
Pelagic sealing by Aleut natives now forbidden by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and Japan.