Kings in Exile

by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts

It was not long after this grim chance that the Pup’s woolly coat began to change. A straight, close-lying under-fur pushed swiftly into view, and the wool dropped out—a process which a certain sense of irritation in his 201 skin led him to hasten by rubbing his back and sides against the rock. In an astonishingly short time his coat grew like his mother’s—a yellowish gray, dotted irregularly with blackish spots, and running to a creamy tone under the belly. As soon as this change was completed to his mother’s satisfaction, he was led down close to the water’s edge, where he had never been allowed before.

Eagerly as he loved the sight of the waves, and the salty savor of them, when the first thin crest splashed up and soused him he shrank back daunted. It was colder, too, that first slap in his face, than he had expected. He turned, intending to retreat a little way up the rocks and consider the question, in spite of the fact that there was his little mother in the water, swimming gayly a few feet out from shore and coaxing him with soft cries. He was anxious to join her—but not just yet. Then, all at once the question was decided for him. His real mother, who was just behind him, suddenly thrust her muzzle under his flank, and sent him rolling into deep water.

He came up at once, much startled. Straightway he found that he could move in the water much more easily and naturally than on shore—and he applied the discovery to getting ashore 202 again with all possible haste. But his mother, awaiting him at the edge, shoved him off relentlessly.

Feeling much injured, he turned and swam out to his other mother. Here the first one joined him; and in a few minutes amazement and resentment alike were lost in delight, as he began to realize that this, at last, was life. Here, and not sprawling half helplessly on the rocks, was where he belonged. He swam, and dived, and darted like a fish, and went wild with childish ecstasy. He had come to his own element. After this, he hardly ever returned to the cave, but slept close at the side of one or the other of his mothers, on the open rocks just a few feet above the edge of tide.

A little later came a period of mad weather, ushering in the autumn storms. Snow and sleet drove down out of the north, and lay in great patches over the more level portions of the islets above tide. The wind seemed as if it would lift the islets bodily and sweep them away. The vast seas, green and black and lead-color, thundered down upon the rocks as if they would batter them to fragments. The ledges shuddered under the incessant crashing. When the snow stopped, on its heels came the vanguard of the arctic cold. The ice formed 203 instantly in all the pools left by the tide. Along the edges of the tide it was ground to a bitter slush by the perpetual churning of the waves.

After a week or two of this violence, the seals—who, unlike their polar cousins, the “Harps” and the “Hoods,” were no great lovers of storm and the fiercer cold—began to feel discontented. Presently a little party of them, not more than a score in all, with a few of the stronger youngsters of that season, on a sudden impulse left their stormy ledges and started southward. The Pup, who, thanks to his double mothering, was far bigger and more capable than any of his mates, went with his partner-mothers in the very forefront of the migration.

Straight down along the roaring coast they kept, usually at a distance of not more than half a mile from shore. They had, of course, no objection to going farther out, but neither had they any object in doing so, since the fish-life on which they fed as they journeyed was the more abundant where the sea began to shoal. With their slim, sleek, rounded bodies, thickest at the fore flippers and tapering finely to tail and muzzle, each a lithe and close-knit structure of muscle and nerve-energy, they could swim with astounding speed; and therefore, although there was no hurry whatever, they went along at the pace of a motor-boat. 204

All this time the gale was lashing the coast, but it gave them little concern. Down in the black troughs of the gigantic rollers there was always peace from the yelling of the wind—a tranquillity wherein the gulls and mews would snatch their rest after being buffeted too long about the sky. Near the tops of the waves, of course, it was not good to be, for the gale would rip the crests off bodily and tear them into shreds of whipping spray. But the seals could always dive and slip smoothly under these tormented regions. Moreover, if weary of the tossing surfaces and the tumult of the gale, they had only to sink themselves down, down, into the untroubled gloom beneath the wave-bases, where greenish lights gleamed or faded with the passing of the rollers overhead, and where strange, phosphorescent shapes of life crawled or clung among the silent rocks. Longer than any other red-blooded animal, except the whale, could their lungs go without fresh oxygen; so, though they knew nothing of those great depths where the whales sometimes frequent, it was easy for them to go deep enough to get below the storm.

Sometimes a break in the coast-line, revealing the mouth of an inlet, would tempt the little band of migrants. Hastening shoreward, they 205 would push their way inland between the narrowing banks, often as far as the head of tide, gambolling in the quiet water, and chasing the salmon fairly out upon the shoals. Like most discriminating creatures, they were very fond of salmon, but it was rarely, except on such occasions as this, that they had a chance to gratify their taste.

After perhaps a week of this southward journeying, the travellers found themselves one night at the head of a little creek where the tide lapped pleasantly on a smooth, sandy beach. They were already getting into milder weather, and here, a half mile inland, there was no wind. The sky was overcast, and the seals lay in contented security along the edge of the water. The blacker darkness of a fir forest came down to within perhaps fifty paces of their resting-place. But they had no anxieties. The only creatures that they had learned to fear on shore besides man were the polar bears; and they knew they were now well south of that deadly hunter’s range. As for eagles, they did not hunt at night; and, moreover, they were a terror only in the woolly-coated, baby stage of a seal’s existence.