“Oh, hang my legs, brother!” replied the other. “They’ll soon come right, never fear, when they have had a good wash in salt water. It was the noise of the blessed birds that bothered me more than all their pecking; and, I can say truly of them, as of an old dog, that their bark is worse than their bite!”
So chuckling, the lad appeared to think no more of it; albeit he had not escaped scathless, and had been really in imminent peril a moment before. “The penguins do bark, don’t they, Fritz?” he presently asked when he had stopped laughing.
“Yes,” said his brother, “I don’t think we can describe the sounds they make as anything else than barking. Talking of dogs, I wish I had my old Gelert here; he would soon have made a diversion in your favour and routed the penguins!”
“Would he?” exclaimed Eric in a doubting tone, still rather sore in his mind at having been forced to beat a retreat before his feathered assailants. “I fancy the best dog in the world would have been cowed by those vicious brutes; for, if he didn’t turn tail, he would be pecked to death in a minute!”
Eric was not far wrong, as a fine setter, belonging to one of the officers of HMS Challenger, when that vessel was engaged in surveying the islands of the South Atlantic, during her scientific voyage in 1874, was torn to pieces by the penguins in the same way that Eric was assailed, before it could be rescued.
“Never mind,” said Fritz, “I wish dear old Gelert were here all the same.”
“So do I,” chorussed Eric, jumping up on his legs and shaking himself, to see whether his bones might not have received some damage in the affray. “We should have rare fun setting him at the penguins and interrupting their triumphant marches up and down the beach!” And he raised his fist threateningly at his late foes.
“Do you know,” observed Fritz, who had been cogitating awhile, “I think I see the reason for their methodical habit of going to and from the water.”
“Indeed?” said Eric.
“Yes. Don’t you recollect how an equal number seem always to come out from the rookery and proceed down the beach when the other batches land from the sea, just as if they took it in rotation to go fishing?”