Even gentle Matkah , his mother , said : `` You will never be able to stop the killing . Go and play in the sea , Kotick . '' And Kotick went off and danced the Fire-dance with a very heavy little heart . That autumn he left the beach as soon as he could , and set off alone because of a notion in his bullet-head . He was going to find Sea Cow , if there was such a person in the sea , and he was going to find a quiet island with good firm beaches for seals to live on , where men could not get at them . So he explored and explored by himself from the North to the South Pacific , swimming as much as three hundred miles in a day and a night . He met with more adventures than can be told , and narrowly escaped being caught by the Basking Shark , and the Spotted Shark , and the Hammerhead , and he met all the untrustworthy ruffians that loaf up and down the seas , and the heavy polite fish , and the scarlet spotted scallops that are moored in one place for hundreds of years , and grow very proud of it ; but he never met Sea Cow , and he never found an island that he could fancy . If the beach was good and hard , with a slope behind it for seals to play on , there was always the smoke of a whaler on the horizon , boiling down blubber , and Kotick knew what that meant . Or else he could see that seals had once visited the island and been killed off , and Kotick knew that where men had come once they would come again . He picked up with an old stumpy-tailed albatross , who told him that Kerguelen Island was the very place for peace and quiet , and when Kotick went down there he was all but smashed to pieces against some wicked black cliffs in a heavy sleet-storm with lightning and thunder . Yet as he pulled out against the gale he could see that even there had once been a seal nursery . And it was so in all the other islands that he visited . Limmershin gave a long list of them , for he said that Kotick spent five seasons exploring , with a four months ' rest each year at Novastoshnah , when the holluschickie used to make fun of him and his imaginary islands . He went to the Gallapagos , a horrid dry place on the Equator , where he was nearly baked to death ; he went to the Georgia Islands , the Orkneys , Emerald Island , Little Nightingale Island , Gough 's Island , Bouvet 's Island , the Crossets , and even to a little speck of an island south of the Cape of Good Hope . But everywhere the People of the Sea told him the same things . Seals had come to those islands once upon a time , but men had killed them all off . Even when he swam thousands of miles out of the Pacific and got to a place called Cape Corrientes -LRB- that was when he was coming back from Gough 's Island -RRB- , he found a few hundred mangy seals on a rock and they told him that men came there too . That nearly broke his heart , and he headed round the Horn back to his own beaches ; and on his way north he hauled out on an island full of green trees , where he found an old , old seal who was dying , and Kotick caught fish for him and told him all his sorrows . `` Now , '' said Kotick , `` I am going back to Novastoshnah , and if I am driven to the killing-pens with the holluschickie I shall not care . '' The old seal said , `` Try once more .
I am the last of the Lost Rookery of Masafuera , and in the days when men killed us XXXXX the hundred thousand there was a story on the beaches that some day a white seal would come out of the North and lead the seal people to a quiet place .
So as at behind by if of than upon with