"Yes, since he's inviting himself we can't be so impolite as to leave him," said Mr. Chillingworth.
Accordingly, a line was made fast to the totem and he was towed back to the ship and once more restored to office as official mascot in the bow of the Northerner. But the ship did not get under way at once following the adventure of part of her crew. The body of the wounded whale still hung limply to her bow. Sailors with tackles had to be called into requisition before the vast obstruction could be cleared.
By this time, as if by magic, thousands of birds had appeared. They fell upon the carcass, paying scant attention to the men at work on it, and fought and tore and devoured flesh and blubber as if they were famished. The captain said that they were whale birds, such as haunt the track of ships engaged in whale trade for weeks at a time.
"Gracious, we certainly are having exciting times!" said Tom as the ship once more got under way bound for her next port of call, Valdez, to the east of the great Kenai Peninsula.
"I expect you boys will have more exciting times later than any you have yet experienced," remarked the captain, who happened to be passing along the deck at the time. "Your adventure with the whales reminds me of a yarn that a certain old Captain Peleg Maybe used to spin, of the perils of whaling. Like to hear it?"
The boys chorused assent. They knew something of the captain's ability as a spinner of yarns.
"Well, it appears, according to the way old Captain Peleg used to tell it, that his ship, the Cachelot, was becalmed in these seas while out after whales," began the skipper with somewhat of a twinkle in his eye. "One day he decided to enliven the monotony of the constant doldrums by having his small dory lowered and going a-fishing after halibut. Well, the boat was lowered away and the skipper pulled off to some distance from the ship before he cast his lines.
"Now it seems strange, doesn't it, in an ocean five hundred miles wide and a thousand feet deep, that when he cast his light anchor overboard, the fluke of it should land in the blow-hole of a whale, which isn't much bigger than a man's fist?"
"What's a blow-hole?" demanded Sandy.
"Why, the orifice through which a whale spouts or sounds, as whalemen call it. You had a specimen of spouting when that whale Master Jack shot at gave you a shower bath. But, according to Captain Peleg, that was just what happened to him. The fluke of his anchor lodged right in that whale's nostril.