“No,” she replied, “I didn’t mind them, quite the reverse. I came here because of them.”
“Because of them!”
“Yes. They were company.”
“Meaning—”
“Friends.”
“Y’mean to say—friends did you call them? Well, I don’t know, there’s no accountin’.”
He hung in irons. So she had been keeping company with the sea cows—and she talked of them as “friends.”
Now Raft, for all his limitless power of compassion for a female in distress would have slaughtered those same “sea-cows” to the last bull, and without a shred of compunction or compassion, had he possessed kettles to boil down the blubber and a vessel to carry the oil. He had already done in two of the babies for food when she was not looking. The idea of talking about them as friends tickled his mind in a new place. Then, as he glanced at the great bulls taking headers in the sunset light and snorting in from the sea and squatting over the beach, he came as near as anything to bursting into a roar of laughter.
Then he suddenly remembered supper and went off to prepare it.
The girl, left to herself, smiled. He had given her back that power and, like the sea elephants when they repulsed the penguins, he had given her something to smile over. She saw that he could not understand her in the least in a lot of little things, whilst she understood him through and through—or so she thought. She had thought the same about the sea elephants till the great battle, and—she had never seen Raft with murder in his eyes making the elements of beef tea.