Chapter IV: The Walrus Herd

On a bare, flat island of the ice pack sprawled a herd of walruses. Sitka stared!

They were the fattest, ugliest, fiercest looking monsters the little white bear had ever seen. They were not as fierce as they looked, however, as Mother White Bear knew, for they lived on clams and shell-fish. Their fierce appearance came partly from the long ivory tusks with which they dug their clams.

They were enormous creatures, some of the old bulls weighing fully two thousand pounds. Like seals, their legs consisted of flappers. But there the resemblance ended. Instead of silky fur, they had ugly, hairless, warty-looking hides, tough and wrinkled and of a muddy brown.

Neither have they the brains of the seal tribe: for they had found the life of the clam digger so easy that they had no need of brains, and Nature takes back what we do not use. Their thick necks ended in heads so shallow that there seemed to be nothing there but a pair of tiny eyes and the whiskers at the roots of their tusks.

On land these ungainly monsters were almost helpless in their fatness,--instead of being agile like seals. But in the sea they were marvelous swimmers, their layers of fat blubber helping there to float them.

However, like all mammals, they will fight fiercely when their babies are in danger.

As Sitka and his mother approached the ice where lay a herd of mother walruses and their young, the mothers eyed them angrily, and the moment they scrambled aboard the floe, several of them charged with the utmost ferocity, bellowing and rearing themselves high on their hind quarters as if to fling themselves on the intruders and crush them flat, as, indeed, they might have done, had not Mother White Bear given Sitka the signal to dive off into the water again. Dearly would she have loved to treat him to walrus calf, but it was plain they would have to try strategy in capturing such prey.

For a time they swam around, not too close to the mother walruses. The fathers were digging clams, heaping great piles of them on shore, then settling to their feast, or sometimes eating as they dug. Sitka eyed these clam piles with envy and a little mischief. “Mother, I’m going to try it again!” he announced. And before she could utter a warning, he had made a dash for the breakfast a huge old bull was looking forward to, as he dug away in the shallow water.

With a bellow of wrath the old fellow reared his monstrous head and eyed the white cub with a gleam of anger. “Come back!” whoofed Mother White Bear. But Sitka did not hear. The next moment the ivory tusks would have come down straight into the middle of Sitka’s back, but that he dodged, and slid into the water with no more than a red gash on his white side.

“Just wait till I’m a little bigger!” he roared at the walrus. “You just wait!”

It was therefore with huge interest that he watched his mother, towards dusk that afternoon, prepare to creep up on a walrus calf. Bidding Sitka remain in hiding behind a chunk of ice, she flattened herself like a cat creeping up on a bird, and waited till it should be wholly dark. She had fixed on a calf who, with his mother, lay a little to one side of the main body of the herd, and in order to take them by surprise, she and Sitka had made their approach by swimming first out to sea, then doubling back and approaching with nothing showing above water-line save the black tips of their noses.

In that interval just between sundown and the first stars, when it was darkest, she began creeping slowly forward. Once her foot scraped the ice, and the walrus cow looked up suspiciously, and Mother White Bear held as still as a rock till the cow had gone to sleep again. Then forward she crept, nearer, nearer, nearer, nearer! Sitka could no longer see her white bulk for the darkness, nor could he hear aught but the wind and the waves.

With a sudden dash she had broken the calf’s neck with a blow and was dragging his huge weight back over the ice. The walrus cow was roused now and rearing this way and that, trying to overtake them. But so awkward are walruses on land that she could make no headway compared with agile Mother White Bear; and though her bellowing awoke the herd and they raised the most terrific alarm, they were still farther away than she. In the inky darkness they only tumbled over one another in their awkwardness, searching in vain for the cause of the disturbance. Had Mother White Bear met them in the water, it would have been a different story. But she did not take to the water till she had reached the place where she had left Sitka. Then, softly, softly, they slipped over the edge of the ice and began towing the fat body of the calf to shore. It meant feasting for many days.

* * * * *

It was only a week later that they watched, themselves safely hidden, their black noses just barely out of water, while a band of Eskimos went walrus hunting, and Sitka marveled to see what cowards walruses could be. As the little brown men approached in their kyacks (fearless in these frail skin boats), the whole herd simply rushed terrified into the water and swam for their lives. Even then it was simple enough for the hunters to make a kill with their bone-pointed spears. Had the walruses not been such cowards, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for them to have reared their tusked heads out of the water and crushed the boats.