“Well, I do!” interrupted Phil, “and I hope I shall never be called upon to shoot another seal.”
The reason why Serge was unable to regard the business of killing animals, whose skins represented money, in the same light that Phil did was because of the vastly different surroundings amid which he had been brought up. The most important industries of the great territory that claimed him as a son are hunting, fur-trading, and fishing. In fact, these and a little mining were the only business pursuits of which he had known anything until he started on his long voyage to the Atlantic coast. Thus from his earliest childhood he had been brought up to believe that fur-bearing animals were to be killed wherever found, and to regard a successful hunter with the same respect that Phil would accord to a successful banker or lawyer.
Thus we find individuals, communities, and even nations, regarding the same things from entirely different points of view according as they have been educated. Each honestly believes himself or itself to be in the right, and that all others must be wrong. In this manner arise differences of opinion that sometimes lead to strife. Wherefore let us try to look at all things from our neighbor’s point of view before concluding to differ with him concerning them.
The foregoing paragraph is a sermon, and though it is a very tiny one, it ought to apologize for intruding itself into a story. I am afraid, though, that, like many other sermons we are all acquainted with, it is so puffed up with its own conceit that it will do nothing of the kind.
So while Phil Ryder had arrived at the conclusion that the business of killing seals was one that no self-respecting hunter who also claimed to be a sportsman could follow, Serge Belcofsky regarded it as a most eminently respectable occupation, in which opinions both lads were right.
In the meantime, while these discussions were going on in forecastle and on deck, the Seamew flew northward for a day and a night. It was generally believed that she was in search of some new fishing-ground, for, as all hands knew, Bering Sea is one of the best-stocked fish-preserves in the world, and contains a supply of food fishes sufficient for the feeding of all the people in the world.
It is one of the very foggiest places in the world also, being even more foggy than the Bay of Fundy, and for the same reason, which is warm water and cold air. As the warm waters of the Gulf Stream enter the Bay of Fundy, so the warm waters of the great Japan current enter Bering Sea. In both places they meet waves of cold arctic air, by which evaporation is condensed into fog. If the air were as warm as or warmer than the water there would be no fog, as is the case in the tropics; but when warm water and cold air meet fog is the result.
The steam that we see issuing from the spout of a teakettle as it sits on top of a stove is nothing more nor less than fog. It is the vapor rising from the hot water in the kettle condensed by the much cooler air outside. If the outer air were as hot as that inside the kettle we would see no steam, though the invisible vapor would be passing from the spout just the same. To prove this it is only necessary to set the teakettle in the oven.
Thus Bering Sea is always foggy during the summer months, when its waters are warmer than its air, and that is one reason why the fur-seal, who dearly loves cool wet weather and foggy days, finds in it a congenial home and makes it his summer resort. Another reason is that these waters so abound in fish that form the seal’s chief food, and to procure which he thinks nothing of swimming one hundred or more miles in a day from his rookeries on the Pribyloff Islands.