The White Seal

: This is the story of Kotick the White Seal

and the long voyages he made through the oceans of the earth

in search of a perfect island--

an island where seals could be safe forever

from their terrible enemy: man.

All these things happened years ago

at a place called Novastoshnah,

on the island of Saint Paul,

away and away in the Bering Sea.

Nobody comes to Novastoshnah except on business,

and the only people who have regular business there

are the seals...

and those who hunt the seals.

In the summer months,

by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands,

the seals come out of the cold gray sea,

for Novastoshnah has probably the finest accommodations for seals

of any place in all the world.

Sea Catch was 15 years old,

a huge tawny-fur seal,

whose weight--

if anyone had been foolish enough to try and weigh him--

was nearly 700 pounds.

Sea Catch was always ready for just one more fight

in defense of his home,

but, as there were 40 or 50,000 other bull seals

hunting for the same thing each spring,

good space was difficult to find

and even more difficult to defend.

The wives wisely never came to the island

until late in May or in early June,

for they did not care to be torn to pieces.

Sea Catch had just finished his 45th fight that year

when Matkah, his soft, sleek, gentle-eyed wife,

came up out of the sea.

Oh, it's you-- late as usual.

Where the devil have you been?

How thoughtful of you, dear.

You've taken the old place again.

I haven't been doing anything but fight for it since the middle of May.

The beach is disgracefully crowded this season.

Oh, why can't people stay where they belong?

You do provide such a beautiful nursery

for our babies every year, Sea Catch.

Oh, you're a wonderful husband and father, too.

Sea Catch...

I do believe...

our baby, our Kotick, is going to stay white.

Empty clamshells and dry seaweed!

There has never been such a thing--

as a white seal.

Well, there is now, and he's your son.

Come along, darling.

White seal!

Preposterous!

Nothing like that ever happened on my side of the family.

Baby seals cannot swim when they are born,

but they are unhappy until they learn,

and so they constantly move towards the sea.

Practicing in a shallow, protected cove

under the watchful eye of his mother,

it took Kotick long weeks of floundering to learn to use his flippers.

And then, one day,

Kotick found that he truly belonged to the water,

that he belonged to the sea, not the land.

Late in October,

the seals leave Saint Paul's for the deep water,

following the great fish roads of the sea--

the paths taken forever and ever by huge schools of fish.

Au revoir, my dear.

See if you can get a decent tan on that child before next year.

Take care of yourself, dear.

Good-bye, Daddy.

The powerful bulls, secure in their fat wet suits,

spend the winter in the icy Alaskan waters,

while the mothers and their young

swim thousands of miles south

past San Francisco,

as far south as San Diego and Mexico.

And now Kotick's education really began.

His mother taught him how to follow the halibut

along the undersea banks of the North Pacific.

Matkah showed him where the cod swam

and how to find them.

She showed him how to wrench the rockling

out of his hole among the weedy reeds.

And, before leaving him to learn to survive alone,

she taught him how to skirt the wrecks

lying a hundred fathoms below water

so that he could escape the seals' most terrifying enemy:

the shark.

Kotick soon learned the important difference

between sharks and dolphins:

that dolphins have horizontal or flat tails,

just as do seals, walrus, sea otters,

and all other sea mammals,

while sharks and all other fish

have vertical or up-and-down tails.

Hmm, thought Kotick,

flat tail.

This is obviously a very large dolphin.

But then, it might just be helpful sometime

to have a dolphin as big as this one for a friend.

Uh, good day, Mr. Dolphin, sir?

Dolphin? Dolphin?

I, young man, am 87 feet long.

I weigh 216,000 pounds 13 ounces.

Therefore, I am a whale,

not a dolphin or a sardine, right?

Right. Oh, very right.

Oh, very, very, very right indeed. Yes.

Just so we understand one another.

Now run along. I want to take a nap for about two weeks.

Yes?

Good nap-- uh, good night,

uh, sir-- uh, Mr. Dolphin--

Ooh! Mr. Whale!

Then one day, Kotick saw another strange

but harmless-looking sea creature.

Kotick, I leave you alone for a few weeks,

and you almost lose your life.

Never, never ever stop to look at a boat.

A boat? Lose my--

but it has a flat tail.

Oh, are boats bad-- like sharks?

Boats are the most dangerous things on the ocean,

because boats carry men.

Men?

Men are the most terrible, most pitiless enemy seals will ever know.

But do men have up-and-down tails?

How can I keep away from them?

How do I know them when I see them?

You will know them, my darling, because...

they will be dressed in the skins of dead seals.

But after six more months alone

without setting flipper on dry land,

after seeing boats only at great distances,

Kotick had lost all fear of that mysterious thing called man.

He had grown enormously,