The Sea Wolf, page 229 by Jack London
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prettily. "I'll admit I don't like defeat any more than you do, or any more than I like the idea of killing such pretty, inoffensive creatures."
"Pretty!" I sniffed. "I failed to mark anything pre-eminently pretty about those foamy-mouthed beasts that raced me."
"Your point of view," she laughed. "You lacked perspective. Now if you did not have to get so close to the subject--"
"The very thing!" I cried. "What I need is a longer club. And there's that broken oar ready to hand."
"It just comes to me," she said, "that Captain Larsen was telling me how the men raided the rookeries. They drive the seals, in small herds, a short distance inland before they kill them."
"I don't care to undertake the herding of one of those harems," I objected.
"But there are the holluschickie," she said. "The holluschickie haul out by themselves, and Dr. Jordan says that paths are left between the harems, and that as long as the holluschickie keep strictly to the path they are unmolested by the masters of the harem."
"There's one now," I said, pointing to a young bull in the water. "Let's watch him, and follow him if he hauls out."
He swam directly to the beach and clambered out into a small opening between two harems, the masters of which made warning noises but did not attack him. We watched him travel slowly inward, threading about among the harems along what must have been the path.
"Here goes," I said, stepping out; but I confess my heart was in my mouth as I thought of going through the heart of that monstrous herd.
"It would be wise to make the boat fast," Maud said.
She had stepped out beside me, and I regarded her with wonderment.
She nodded her head determinedly. "Yes, I'm going with you, so you may as well secure the boat and arm me with a club."
"Let's go back," I said dejectedly. "I think tundra grass, will do, after all."
"You know it won't," was her reply. "Shall I lead?"
With a shrug of the shoulders, but with the wa