The White Seal

Kotick is born white on the crowded breeding beaches of St. Paul's Island in the Bering Sea — an unusual color that marks him as different from the first day. He grows up watching the annual harvest: the men who come with clubs and long knives, who sort the young male seals by size, drive the selected ones inland, and kill them for their fur. Thousands die every year. The older seals — Sea Catch, Matkah, the great bulls who hold the best beaches — accept this without question. The killing ground is a fact, like the tide. Kotick watches and cannot understand how a fact can simply be accepted when it can be avoided.

He begins searching. He asks the Sea Cow, the Killer Whale, the old Albatross, the Loggerhead Turtle — anyone who has traveled the Pacific — whether there is a beach where men do not come. Most do not know. Some mock him. He swims to beach after beach — Kerguelen, Heard Island, remote shores in every direction — and finds men, or finds beaches too exposed to survive on, or finds nothing. Year after year. The other seals on St. Paul's think he has gone strange. He has a reputation for searching, which is not an admirable reputation among seals.

He finds the safe beach finally through the Sea Cows, vast ancient creatures who take him through an underwater passage into a lagoon that opens onto a long stretch of sand where no man has ever set foot. He verifies it carefully. Then he returns to St. Paul's and does the thing the story has been building toward: he challenges every large bull on the beach, fights his way through them one by one, and earns the right to be heard. He leads his people through the sea-cave to the safe beach. The story's last line reports that the seal rookeries are still there today, which is Kipling's way of saying the search was real and the resolution was real. The searching made the difference.