. Here
was safe seclusion, with countless inaccessible retreats. Here was
food in exhaustless plenty; and here was weather benignant enough for
any reasonable needs.

It was just here, off the Tuskets, that the Pup got another lesson.
Hitherto his ideas of danger had been altogether associated with the
land where eagles swooped out of a clear sky and bears skulked in the
darkness, and where, moreover, he himself was incapable of swift
escape. But now he found that the sea, too, held its menace for the
gentle kindred of the seals. It was a still, autumnal morning, blue
and clear, with a sunny sparkle on sea and air. The seals were most of
them basking luxuriously on the seaward ledges of one of the outermost
islands, while half a dozen of the more energetic were amusing
themselves with their game of tag in the deep water. Pausing for a
moment to take breath, after a sharp wrestling-match far down among
the seaweeds, the Pup's observant eyes caught sight of a small, black
triangular object cutting swiftly the smooth surface of the swells.
He stared at it curiously. It was coming towards him, but it did not,
to his uninitiated eyes, look dangerous. Then he became conscious of a
scurrying of alarm all about him; and cries of sharp warning reached
him from the sentinels on the ledge. Like a flash he dived, at an
acute angle to the line of approach of the mysterious black object.
Even in the instant, it was close upon him, and he caught sight of a
long, terrible, gray shape, thrice as long as a seal, which turned on
one side in its rush, showing a whitish belly, and a gaping,
saw-toothed mouth big enough to take him in at one gulp. Only by a
hair's-breadth did he avoid that awful rush, carrying with him as he
passed the sound of the snapping jaws and the cold gleam of the
shark's small, malignant eye.

Hideously frightened, he doubled this way and that, with a nimbleness
that his huge pursuer could not hope to match. It took the shark but a
few seconds to realize that this was a vain chase. An easier quarry
caught his eye. He darted straight shoreward, where the deep water ran
in abruptly to the very lip of the ledge. The Pup came to the surface
to watch. One of the younger seals, losing its wits utterly with
fright, and forgetting that its safety lay in the deep water where it
could twist and dodge, was struggling frantically to clamber out upon
the rocks. It had almost succeeded, indeed. It was just drawing up its
narrow