The Murderer studied his depth gauge to cover his embarrassment. The reason the shark had been so big was that it belonged to a species with the whale-like habit of straining the water for minute crustaceans. It was harmless and had winced from his first thrust. Then its shagreen hide had tensed to armor-toughness, and it had been like trying to stab a submarine. It left because it had no reason to stay.
"I'm relieved," one of the submariners laughed, "that stabbing fish is how he got the name Murderer."
"Not only fish," Barney went on enthusiastically. "This boy almost got himself court-martialed. We're working from the icebreaker, out from Point Barrow, diving from a whaleboat, and before the Annapolis ensign can say a word, Murderer's over the side. We put our face-plates in the water. He's bubbling down on a walrus! I swear, he rides it like a bucking horse. You need a long blade in the arctic. And ugly—when we bent a cable to that walrus from the icebreaker, the walrus stalled the winch!"
"What about tusks?" a submariner's voice asked.
The Murderer had been well aware of tusks. For three days he had been studying the walrus herd with fascination. These staring-eyed, noisy mammals were living in icy water that would numb and kill a man in a few minutes.
Some of them were diving to clam beds more than two hundred and fifty feet down, where their bodies were subjected to a pressure of more than eight atmospheres. In shallower water, where cockles predominated, he had actually observed them raking the muddy bottom with their tusks and rising with great disintegrating masses of mud and shells between their flippers. Few men had ever seen that.
He marveled at the evolutionary process by which some primitive land mammal of the Eocene Period had become the walrus.
Why he had swum down and attacked a walrus, he did not know. Afterward he felt ashamed, not just because it was a dumb thing to do and he'd had three ribs cracked and should have been killed; not because it was a show-off thing, with sailors urging him to stand in front of its hoisted body so they could take pictures for their girl friends; not because Barney lost his appetite for a couple of days and didn't seem very eager to dive near the herd. What bothered him was the indescribable feeling he'd had as he swam down with his knife to the walrus, a feeling closer than hunger....