Then she was a female. Sex is more than a physical difference between one being and another, one can fancy it as one of the outstanding signs of the Wild to be read by instinct, as instinct reads the weather or season signs, or the sea mile posts that lead the seals and sea elephants thousands of leagues to strike some particular beach as an arrow strikes the bull’s eye of a target.
The female, unless with young, is not dangerous to the male. One may fancy that amongst the few but burningly important warnings and directions in the book of Instinct.
Here, at the sea edge and within a few feet of the breaking waves, she sat down on a projecting rock and tried to measure with her eye the vast herd. The whole beach from where she sat to where the flat rocks ceased a mile and a half away on her right was spotted with them and she noticed that here and there they were always putting out to sea and coming ashore again.
Making for a spot on the right, a hundred yards from her she saw one coming ashore, swift as an arrow, steering with straight steadfast eyes and landing with the water cascading from his huge shoulders, whilst on the left one was putting out to sea in a burst of foam.
Then, of a sudden, all the shore edge bulls got in commotion slithering about, raising themselves on their flippers and blowing off steam.
A sea elephant was coming towards the beach, moving with a speed thrice that of any of the others, his head was raised and she could see the eyes that seemed blazing with wrath or challenge.
Then, as he came thundering on to the rocks, he lifted the echoes with a roar that resounded for miles along the beach.
All the others had landed in silence.
She did not know that this was a newcomer, a belated bull, held days behind the arrival of the others by some chance of the sea. Maybe he had hung fishing off the South Shetlands or the Horn, or beached for repairs after some sea fight off the Falklands; whatever had held him he was late.
He came swiftly up the rocks, casting his head from side to side but unchallenged. There were no females there yet to fight for and they evidently recognized him as one of the herd and not a stranger. The herd instinct, without which a nation would be a mob, ruled here and gave the belated one his place, and after a while of squattering about and sniffing and blowing he settled down with quieted eyes to rest. He had reached one of the stopping stages of his life, with the surety with which he would reach the last, on some desolate beach or reef of the sea.