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 by 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 . I am old , and I shall never live to see that day , but others will . Try once more . '' And Kotick curled up his mustache -LRB- it was a beauty -RRB- and said , `` I am the only white seal that has ever been born on the beaches , and I am the only seal , black or white , who ever thought of looking for new islands . '' This cheered him immensely ; and when he came back to Novastoshnah that summer , Matkah , his mother , begged him to marry and settle down , for he was no longer a holluschick but a full-grown sea-catch , with a curly white mane on his shoulders , as heavy , as big , and as fierce as his father . `` Give me another season , '' he said . `` Remember , Mother , it is always the seventh wave that goes farthest up the beach . ''
Curiously enough , there was another seal who thought XXXXX she would put off marrying till the next year , and Kotick danced the Fire-dance with her all down Lukannon Beach the night before he set off on his last exploration .
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