Here, lacking a leader, their migration came to an end. There seemed no reason to go farther, since here was everything they wanted. The Pup, by this time an expert pursuer of all but the swiftest fish, was less careful now to keep always within his mother’s reach, though the affection between the two was still ardent. One day, while he was swimming some little distance apart from the herd, he noticed a black-hulled boat rocking idly on the swells near by. It was too near for his comfort, so he dived at once, intending to seek a safer neighborhood. But as luck would have it, he had 214 hardly plunged below the surface when he encountered an enormous school of young herring. What throngs of them there were! And how crowded together! Never had he seen anything like it. They were darting this way and that in terrific excitement. He himself went wild at once, dashing hither and thither among them with snapping jaws, destroying many more than he could eat. And still they seemed to throng about him ever the more closely. At last he got tired of it, and dashed straight ahead to clear the shoal. The next moment, to his immeasurable astonishment, he was checked and flung back by a fine, invisible barrier. No, it was not quite invisible. He could see a network of meshes before him. Puzzled and alarmed, he shot up to the surface to reconnoitre.
As his head rose above the water, his heart fairly stopped for a second with dismay. The black side of the fishing boat was just above him, and the terrifying eyes of men looked straight down into his. Instantly he dived again, through the ever thickening masses of the herring. But straightway again he met the fine, invincible barrier of the net. Frantically he struggled to break through it, but only succeeded in coiling it about him till he could not 215 move a flipper. And while he wriggled there impotently, under the squirming myriads of the fish, he was lifted out into the air and dragged into the boat.
Seeing the damage he had wrought in their catch, the fishermen were for knocking their captive straightway on the nose. But as he lay there, looking up with innocent eyes of wonder and appeal through the meshes, something in his baby helplessness softened the captain’s heart.
“Hold hard, Jim,” he ordered, staying a big sailor’s hand. “Blamed if the little varmint ain’t got eyes most as soft as my Libby’s. I reckon he’ll make a right purty pet fer the kid, an’ kind of keep her from frettin’ after her canary what died last Sunday.”
“He don’t much resemble a canary, Ephraim,” laughed Jim, dropping the belaying-pin.
“I reckon he’ll fill the bill fine, all the same,” said the captain.
So the Pup was carried prisoner to Eastport.
CHAPTER II
As it happened, Miss Libby was a child of decided views. One of the most decided of her views proved to be that a seal pup, with very little voice and that little by no means melodious, was no substitute for a canary. She refused to look at the Pup at all, until her father, much disappointed, assured her that she should have a canary also without further delay. And even then, though she could not remain quite indifferent to the Pup’s soft eyes and confiding friendliness, she never developed any real enthusiasm for him. She would minister amiably to his wants, and laugh at his antics, and praise his good temper, and stroke his sleek, round head, but she stuck resolutely to her first notion, that he was quite too “queer” for her to really love. She could never approve of his having flippers instead of fore paws, and of his lying down all the time even when he walked. As for his hind feet, which stuck out always straight behind him and close together, like a sort of double-barrelled tail, she was quite sure they had been fixed that way by mistake, and 217 she could not, in spite of all her father’s explanations as to the advantages, for a seal, of that arrangement, ever bring herself to accept them as normal.