All around him the water sparkled and dimpled in the sunshine. Here and there dragon-flies glittered as they skimmed over the ripples. Butterflies were fluttering over the golden centres of the floating lilies. Graceful reeds bordered the shore. The juicy grass, that manatees love to eat, grew green, trailing underneath. Far up above it all the summer sky was blue.
The baby manatee did not seem to care for all these beautiful sights. Very likely he could not see well above water, and he did not enjoy the dry, warm feeling of the air. His sense of smell must have been too dull to notice the fragrance of the lilies or the spicy scent from the swamp. Creatures living under water do not use their noses much.
But the little manatee could hear the least soft plop of a leaf falling in the river. The sudden splash of a frog’s jump made him squirm and twist in terror. He wriggled out of his mother’s hold, and sank down, down, down, with the bubbles eddying over his roly-poly body.
Of course he was not afraid, for he could swim as soon as he was born. He paddled with his tail and flapped with his flippers as he went swimming around over the clean white sand of the river-bottom. At first he could not steer very well, and so he bumped into the stems of the lily-plants and tangled his flippers among the roots of the reeds.
Through the pale green of the water all around him he caught sight of his father and big brother. They were creeping about on their flippers and tails, while they munched the weeds and grasses. When they stretched out their heads, toward a bite of something, each one grasped the food between two horny pads in the front of his jaw, tore it free, and then chewed it with his few grinding teeth in the back. Their faces looked like monstrous caterpillars sucking and chewing.
The baby champed his small jaws and sucked with his split upper lip as he watched. The sight of them eating made him so hungry that he wanted his mother to come and feed him with her milk. Manatees are mammals that live in shallow water. Of all the animals in the sea and salt rivers manatees are the only ones that eat only grass and weeds. All other sea-mammals, and fishes, too, eat living creatures.
Sometimes the baby manatee had great fun in rolling over and over on the sand and pebbles at the bottom of the river. The old ones liked to scratch and clean their wrinkled skins by plunging and scraping over the gravel. It was easy enough for them to roll, because they were so round and had no legs to get in the way.
After the tumbling he followed the others as they went paddling to the top of the river. There he twitched apart his lip-lobes and blew, spouting up spray and water. Then, drawing in a long breath, he closed the stoppers in his nostrils and floated down to the sandy bottom to sleep or eat again.
All summer the manatees lived there in the pleasant river. On misty mornings sometimes they swam up to a mud flat, and crawled out to take a nap in the soft warm slime. Out in the air they could sleep and breathe at the same time, without waking up every few minutes. When the baby was tired of staying still he slid down the slippery bank—splash!—into the water.
His splashing sent a snake wriggling away through the swamp. The crabs on the sand below went scuttling wildly hither and thither to escape the flapping of his tail. Fishes darted out-stream, and mussels closed their shells to keep out the stirred-up gravel. The frogs sitting in the mud turned their round eyes to look at the funny little fellow with the wrinkled dark skin.