“But it’s queer I don’t get to shore,” thought Chunky. He did not know what a big place the ocean was, especially when one falls overboard in the middle of it, as the young hippo had done.
Chunky was beginning to feel tired now. He raised his head as far out of the water as he could, and looked all about him. Afar off he saw a black speck, and he remembered, once, when he had swum far out in the jungle river, and looked back, the shore had seemed to him but a black speck.
“That must be the shore,” thought Chunky. “I’ll swim toward that. Then I’ll be all right.”
So Chunky swam toward the black speck, which, though it got larger, did not seem large enough for the shore. And then Chunky noticed a queer thing. When he stopped swimming, which he did now and then to rest his legs, the black speck seemed to be coming toward him.
And then, all at once, a lot of black smoke came out of the black speck and Chunky knew what it was. It was the very ship off which he had fallen earlier in the day during the storm.
“Well,” thought Chunky to himself, “if I can’t get to shore, and it doesn’t seem as if I was going to, I suppose I may as well go back to that floating house. At least I can rest there, and, even if I have to go to the circus, maybe it will be as jolly as Tum Tum said it would be. Yes, I’ll go back to the ship.”
At first, those on the steamer knew nothing of Chunky’s swimming about in the ocean. They knew he had fallen overboard when his cage fell and broke, but, if they thought any more about it, they must have thought the hippo was drowned. And so there was much surprise when one of the sailors cried:
“I see something in the water! It looks like a big, black pig!”
“A black pig!” exclaimed the captain. “More likely it’s a shark or a whale!”
However, the captain had the ship steered toward Chunky, where he was swimming, and then, looking through a telescope, the captain saw what really was in the water, and cried: