Swimming slowly, the mother whale filled her
mouth again and again with the tiny darting squid, till she had
strained out and swallowed perhaps a ton of the pulpy provender. As
they felt the whalebone strainers closing about them, each one took
alarm and let fly a jet of inky fluid, as if thinking to hide itself
from Fate; and the dim green of the surrounding water grew clouded till
the calf could hardly see, and had to crowd close to his mother's side.
A twist or two of her mighty flukes, like the screw of an ocean liner,
drove her clear of this obscurity, and carried her, a moment later,
into a packed shoal of southward journeying capelin."
The Babe's mouth opened for the natural question: "What's capelin?"
But Uncle Andy got ahead of him.
"That's a little fish something like a sardine," he explained hastily.
"And they travel in such countless numbers that sometimes a storm will
throw them ashore in long windrows like you see in a hay field, so that
the farmers come and cart them away for manure. Well, it did not take
long for the old whale to fill up even _her_ great stomach, when the
capelin were so numerous. She went ploughing through the shoal lazily,
and stopped at last to rub her little one softly with her flipper.
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