Picking her way between the mothers and their babies she came down to the sea edge, choosing a broad space left vacant because of the bad landing conditions. The rocks here were higher, forming a miniature cliff some four or five feet in height and from this point looking seaward something caught her eye.
Three black objects moving in a line were making a long ripple on the swell. They were the heads of three sea elephants moving like one. Then the line became the segment of a circle bending in shore. But the swimmers were not going to land; they kept parallel to the rocks and a few hundred yards out, and as they passed she could see clearly the great heads and sometimes the massive shoulders rising and washing away the water and the eyes, as the heads swung now and then shorewards, wicked eyes that seemed to blaze with the light of anger or battle.
She was not alone in observing them. They had been spotted by a trumpet-voiced sentry and instantly the whole place was in commotion. The air split with a roar that passed along from section to section of the beach whilst the cliffs resounded and a thousand sea-gulls rose as if from nowhere, crying, cat-calling and making a snowstorm in the sunlight.
On the roar and as if destroyed by it the three heads vanished.
Then, far out, they reappeared, only to dive again, leaving the sea blank, but for a school of porpoises passing along on their quiet business a mile away towards the east.
The girl sat watching. There was something in all this of greater import than the appearance of three swimming sea elephants. The beach told her that. Not a bull in all that vast herd but was in motion, either helping to crowd the females back towards the cliffs or patrolling the rocks. She could see them here and there rising up on their hind-quarters as though to get a better view of the sea. They reminded her of dogs begging for biscuits. Then, turning her eyes seaward again she saw a black spot; it was a moving head. Then another broke the surface and another, till in a moment, and for a mile-long stretch, hundreds of heads appeared, all driving shorewards and then dipping and vanishing only to reappear still closer in and closing on the beach with the swiftness of destroyers.
Then she knew, and, springing up, turned to run; but her retreat was cut off towards the caves by the females herded up and, before she could collect her thoughts, the army of invasion was flinging itself from the water, and the whole sea beach from end to end was filled with the thunder of battle.
For days the lone bulls had been cruising at sea waiting and watching till all the females were on shore under guard of their husbands. So it happened every year as now, ending in a battle for the possession of wives, a battle waged without quarter and with a fury whose sound reached the echoes of the hills.
Safe on the little rock plateau she watched the thunderous onslaught, frightened and then terrified and crying out.
The invaders drove in from the sea like the sweep of a curved sword. They struck the beach first a mile away and the battle ran towards her like fire along tinder, boomed towards her ever loudening till it broke to right and left where the sea bulls flung themselves on the rocks and the land bulls charged the on-comers like battering rams. Some were hurled back, only to return again, others held their ground. Then the real business began whilst the ground trembled and the air shook and the rocks poured blood.