# The Bird Watcher in the Shetlands/Chapter 27

CHAPTER XXVII
A BITTER DISAPPOINTMENT
A MAN here—one accustomed to the sea, but not a Shetlander—had told me that seals come up on the rocks as the tide goes out, and are floated off them as it comes up again—and this, indeed, I have seen. He did not seem to think that they lay on the rocks independently of the tides, so, as the tide to-day should be out about 5.30, I resolved to go to the same place as yesterday—the accustomed haunt of seals here—about two, so as to be in good time. I arrive accordingly, but what is my astonishment to see, on a vast, sloping slab of rock, ending in a miniature cliff, far above the highest line of moist seaweed, and comfortably independent of all tides, twelve seals, of varying figures and different degrees of obesity, lying, roughly, in two rows, and in all sorts of attitudes and depths of repose. What a sight! What beautiful, fat, sleepy things! and what a lovely little secret creek of the wave-lashed, iron-ribbed coast have they found to sleep in! How the waters sleep in it, too! How gently they creep to shores strewn with a wild confusion of titanic black boulders heaped about still huger fragments of the cliff's wastage, so huge, some of them, that they are dwarfed only by the frowning precipices that tower behind! How they lick up upon the brown hanging seaweed that drips against the ​high, dark walls of this their boudoir, falling back from it again with a deep-sucked gurgle that ravishes the ear! What a snug sea-chamber, formed and fashioned by the waves! How the cormorants dive and fish in it, how the gull tears at the drifted carcase of its kind, how the puffins, in ceaseless flight between ocean and their myriad burrows, arch and dome it in! Oh, it is a fine apartment! Its portals on either side are columns of spouting foam, and beyond lies the wild, houseless sea. A seal's dormitory!—how well do the wild things choose! So here, at once, one learns something different to what one is told. Seals care nothing about tides when they can get great slanting slabs that lie high and dry above them. At high tide, or low tide, or middle tide, they are equally ready to sleep.
I came down the steep descent in a way which made me and everything I had on, or carried with me—which was everything I have here to keep me warm and dry—both wet and dirty. At the bottom there was a mass of nasty, brown, wet discomfort; but it had successfully stalked the seals. They lay now right before me, so near as to make the glasses almost a superfluity. Yet how splendidly they showed them up—every mark, turn, and expression, their whiskers, wrinkles, and their fine eyes. And now, still more markedly than yesterday, I note that the favourite attitude of a seal, when lying asleep or dozing, is either on its back or half or three-quarters rolled over towards it. Out of all these twelve, only one lies in ​the way that all illustrations persist in depicting them as lying. Three are absolutely on their backs, with their faces, or rather chins, looking, for long periods, straight up into the sky; others are almost as supine, but, by turning their faces sideways, seem to be less so, whilst the rest vary between this and full on their side, in which position they look much like a huge salmon lying on a fishmonger's dresser. Who has ever drawn seals like this? Where is there such a rendering? Always, as far as I can remember, they are made to lie on their stomachs. Yet here is the living thing.
As various as their attitudes seems to be the degree of their rest. Some raise their heads and look to this side or that, at irregular intervals that are not very long apart. Others seem sunk in deep and heavy slumber, their very attitudes—or rather, their attitudes more than anything else—expressing "the rapture of repose that's there." Yet even these, if watched for long enough, are seen occasionally to raise their heads, or scratch themselves lazily with their front paws, or expand or interlace their hind ones, moving them sometimes in a very curious manner suggesting the rotating screw of a steamer. It would seem, therefore, that, however fast asleep they may look, they are really only in a sort of doze.
Many of these seals are scarred and marked in a very bad way; raw and bleeding the places are sometimes, and I notice here and there what looks ​like a deep and gaping bite. These wounds are mostly on the belly, but the tail of one seal is bloody all round, as though another had seized it in its mouth and severely bitten it. No doubt it is all due to fighting, and the claws, I think, must have played as great a part as the teeth. Two other seals lie on a smaller rock, raised similarly above high-water mark, and a third on one that has only just become uncovered. Altogether, then, there are fifteen of them, making me think of Virgil's description of the Protean herds, written in those happy days before the accursed gun had thinned, as it now has, almost to the verge of extinction, the brave, honest, animal world. Surely the lower thing rules on earth for ever. Those who love living animals, with souls inside them, must see this world made dead and empty by those who love only their skins, stuffed with straw. They conquer, these Philistines, and the finer-touched spirit lies bleeding and suffering beneath them. How grossly we deceive ourselves! ... I say that the "pale Galilean" has not conquered here, but that Thor has, though often in his rival's name.
The modern Christian poet speaks truth as though it were falsehood, and falsehood as though it were truth. Hear Longfellow, for instance—
Force rules the world still,
Has ruled it, shall rule it, Meekness is weakness,
Strength is triumphant,
Over the whole earth
Still is it Thor's-Day!
These seals differ greatly from one another, both in size, figure, markings, and colour of the fur, and especially, as a result of all, in beauty. Most of them look rough, swollen, dropsical creatures, but some are very pretty and elegant, and as these are smaller I suppose them to be the females. Often one may see a look and action in them that seems to speak of coquetry and being wooed.
It is curious that the one seal that lies on its face is the only one out of the twelve that is turned towards the sea. The sea, however, in this case is only a narrow inlet between the rock on which it lies and the shore, the great expanse of it being entirely hidden by the rock itself, which rises perpendicularly, like a cliff, from the highest point of its upward slope. The seal, therefore, really looks shorewards, but across a narrow strip of sea. His eyes, I notice, seem never shut, and at frequent intervals he turns his head to one side or another. All the rest lie either sleeping or dozing, though, as said before, most of them from time to time raise their heads a little and give a lazy look before sinking back into slumber. Is the one seal a sentinel? It looks like it. But why, if this were their custom, should seals ever sleep singly? And this they often do.
​In spite of the shortness of all their four limbs, yet seals, as they stretch themselves, throw up the head, bend the neck and back, raise their fore-feet into the air, or push out the hind ones to their full length whilst at the same time stretching them apart, often have a very startling resemblance to a man. The curves and symmetries of the body—especially the upper portion of it—are sometimes wonderfully suggestive of the human torso, and the resemblance is often helped by the shape of the rock, which, by curving away from the body, allows the lines of it to appear. Nothing, in fact, can look both more like and more unlike a man than do these creatures. See one lying quiescent, a great, swollen, carrot-shaped bladder, and one may scoff at the possibility of any such resemblance; but wait and watch, and in a hundred odd ways one will catch it. When a seal scratches one of his front flippers it is wonderfully like a man scratching the back of one hand with the other. The hind feet can look almost more hand-like. It is true that when the toes are distended to their full width the whole foot is just like a fish's tail in shape, but when they are not stretched so widely apart, and those of the one play, as they often do, with those of the other, then they have a wonderful resemblance to fingers—swollen, gouty fingers, it is true; gloved, too, they look—but still fingers.
Another interesting sight now in the adjoining cove, or rather in the adjoining half of this semi-divided one! A seal comes to its rock there before ​the tide has sufficiently gone down to let it lie upon it. It plays about the rock, fawns upon it, caresses it, woos it, one might say, dives down and circumnavigates it, tries or pretends to try to lie upon it, even under the water, swims away and returns, and does the same thing several times; and as soon as the water is sufficiently shallow to allow of it, it reclines, sea-washed and gently heaving, till the receding tide leaves it high and dry. A pretty thing it is—very—to see a seal thus waiting for its chosen rock to appear.
I was at the ledges about twelve, and found my particular one a blank—not a bird there. Mother and child—father too, and every other bird besides—was off; the cupboard was bare. A bitter disappointment seized hold upon me, sunk into my very soul. Yet what else could I have expected? They may have gone in the night; and, in any case, how, except by actually bivouacking above that ledge, could I have hoped to be there at the exact moment when the departure took place? This I might have managed, or at least have managed better, had my little black sentry-box been a cottage, with some one in it to cook for me. Then I could have got to bed by eight, or at least nine, and been up by three or four; but without this it was impossible. I can do—and I do do now—with as little as most men, but porridge here is like charity, and oh, the time that it takes to make! They talked to me of ten minutes or a quarter of an hour at the outside, spoke even of ​boiling milk flung upon the raw meal—said it would be good like that. "Women said so, that will say anything." Sweetly they smiled, but they understood not the conditions. Oh fire that will not burn up! Oh kettle that will not boil! Oh egg that will crack when you drop it in! Oh one spoon that goeth a-missing! This, and much more "of this harness," as the Spaniard says, has kept me up till ten or later—till eleven, once, when the frying bacon, "in the very moment of projection," was breathed on by the flame of paraffin. (Nothing but paraffin will make a fire burn up in the Shetlands, and even that gets damp sometimes.) So that, having my notes to extend and decipher, and with hard boards, and the wind, and a flea or so, and sometimes the lumbago, I may say, with Comus, almost any night, "What has night to do with sleep?" but without being able to continue, for certainly it has no "better sweets to prove."
But perhaps I should have missed it in any case. Perhaps—nay, I will be certain of it, to lessen heartache—they went off in the night. To think of it! that young, tiny creature! And was it then, in the dark night, when the wind was blowing so furiously, that you were carried down—a little soft, fluffy, delicate-looking thing—to be put upon the great tumultuous sea? through mist and driving spray, with neither moon nor stars to light you, to toss, for the first time in life, on those tumbling, rough-playing waves? I, a grown man, was glad of all I could heap on my bed ​to keep the wind away. I lay and thought of ship-wrecks as I listened to it roaring, but I never thought of you, flitting out to sea through it all, cradled so delicately on your mother's back—if that, indeed, was the way of it. How could I imagine it? Even to watch you, as you lay warm on your cold ledge in the daytime, gave me the lumbago, though wrapped in two good plaids. But at night, and with nothing round you, to leave even that shelter, to cast off from the sheer, horrid edge "into the empty, vast, and wandering air," and then souse into yeasty salt water, without cold or chill taken, without a touch of lumbago—oh, what an iron constitution! You are not the lathe painted to look like iron; you are feathers in steel-work, rather, a powder-puff made out of adamant. But here I register a vow that I will return here, some day, in the height of the putting-off season, and see the little guillemots fly from their cliff's cradle, or ride down on one cradle to another—their mother's soft, warm back, and then
In cradle of the rude, imperious surge.