Sesooā drove her boat’s nose on to the bar to the tune of the old Frenchwoman’s triumphant chant of defiance to the invaders, who had wrecked her dwelling, but would never have it again! Never, never!
The Camp Fire Girl was flinging it now as a merry challenge to the seals, the big, spotted harbor-seals, treating them as invaders--where they were more at home than she was--and disputing with them the right of possession of the milky sand-bar at low tide.
It was a teeming settlement, at low water, that Ipswich Bar--a long, white street fringed by wavy greenery of billows, which had risen miraculously out of the bay, thronged by a motley multitude of gulls, herons, wee sandpipers, petrels, strutting to and fro, exchanging now and again a squawky greeting, hobnobbing with brother or cousin, or coolly ignoring one of another tribe, occasionally parting with a fish to a young one--a dazzling, bewildering Great White Way of birds.
And the flippered, bulky harbor-seals--the marbled seals--in their spotted hair-coats, lay around upon the sands, a whole herd of them, like lazy merchants who, tired of displaying their wares, had reclined, to bask in the sun.
Ploughing the waves to this White Way came another settler, which a certain old sea-dog, Captain Andy Davis, friend of the Morning-Glory Group of Camp Fire Girls, called alternately, with briny disrespect, “a loose old wagon” or an “old red settler,”--in plain English, a broad, flat-bottomed, ruddy-painted camp-boat, impossible to capsize.
This “settler,” bobbing over the green tide, gave the strange effect, somewhat, of a portly, waddling, ruddy old duck which had ambitiously adopted a cygnet. For towed in her wake came a silvery something, graceful as a young swan--a light birch-bark shell, a fifteen-foot canoe whose bark skin shone like satin--with a delicate decoration of ferns, where the outer layer of bark had been scraped away into a pattern, at each tapering end.
The red mother-settler had aboard a cargo--a precious cargo of girlhood--of which one shifting item done up in a bathing-suit, crowned by a red silk handkerchief wound around a curly head, leaned over the stern of the mother-skiff, in rapt admiration of that feather-weight canoe.
“I believe--really believe--that I could have paddled over here to the bar from our beach in her!” burst sanguinely from the lips of that flesh-and-blood item, Lilia Kemp, otherwise Ko-ko-ko, Little Owl. “Even if a green comber had capsized her, I could have righted her again and scrambled in. I could do it, fully dressed, let alone to say in a bathing-suit.”
“Which means you could undress in the water, right her, and get aboard!” corrected an older girl, of shading, twinkling eyelashes between which hovered a firefly glance like a glow-worm playing through an amber fringe of grasses. “Well!--well, I shouldn’t mind a premature ducking myself,” she ran on, her lithe body rhythmically swaying to one of the red oars which she was wielding. “Perhaps--who knows--we may get it, too, if the seals regard us as invaders! Ginger! will you look at them--a whole herd, thirty at least, out of water, sunning themselves on the sands!”
“Oh! we see them, Sara.” It was a general responsive chorus in half a dozen gay young voices. “Goody! I never, never, came so near to a seal--a mustached man-fish--before! We’re going to have the frolic of our lives!” from one in piping solo. “And the birds--birds--birds! Ever see anything like them? Fishing, strutting, squabbling, holding a Peace Conference!”