He laughed. “No,” he said, “no more than flying fish fly—nor so much. As you see. There must be something chasing them.”
At this moment the musical, quavering cry of the Admiral came down to us: “Bl-o-o-ows!”
The spout was dead to windward, about five or six miles off. I, at any rate, could not see it from the deck, even with my glass, there was such a quiver of heated air at the horizon. Captain Nelson came on deck, went up to the main crosstrees, and stayed there for some time, watching. When he came down Captain Coffin asked him what he made of it.
“Can’t make out,” he answered. “Something queer going on. May be swordfish, or perhaps those big sharks; or killers, except for the latitude. We ’ll stand up that way as fast as we can.”
“Lower, sir?” Mr. Baker asked, knowing well what the answer was likely to be.
Captain Nelson shook his head. “Not yet.”
It took us a long time to get up anywhere near, but the spout remained very nearly stationary, and there was considerable white water raised about it. The light breeze, nearly dead ahead, died out, and we wallowed there for a quarter of an hour, in a flat calm. But we were near enough to see what was going on, and I watched through my glass. There were two whales instead of one, very different in size. The smaller of the two seemed to be the centre of the commotion, and I caught several glimpses of bodies, gleaming brightly as they broke the surface for an instant. There must have been five or six of them, but I could not tell certainly whether they were sharks or swordfish or what. I had never seen a killer. The larger whale was making short, savage dashes at the attacking fish, but without any marked result, so far as I could see.
I handed the glass to Captain Coffin. “Won’t you look, sir, and tell me what they are?”
“I don’t really need the glass, boy,” he said, “to tell me that they ’re sharks.” But he took it, and held it to his eyes. “Sharks; big devils, twenty-five or thirty feet long. That whale ’s a small cow, and she must have a small calf under her fin. That ’s what the sharks are after, and they ’ll get it, too, if we don’t get a breeze pretty quick.”
Small difference it could make to the whale what got it! They were still keeping up the fight vigorously when a cooler breath came out of the southeast. It was only a puff, but soon there was another, which lasted longer; and before many minutes the breath of cooler air was steady, and growing stronger. We were just on the northern edge of the southeast trades, and had edged into them, or they had passed us, which amounted to the same thing. Captain Nelson had been edging to the southward for some days, with just that in view.