Page:The Worst Journey in the World volume 2.djvu/340

Rh wicked hatch out, but those of the weak are addled. You must have a jolly good pile of stones to hatch eggs after a blizzard like that in December 1911, when the rookeries were completely snow-covered: nests, eggs, parents and all.

Once hatched the chicks grow quickly from pretty grey atoms of down to black lumps of stomach topped by a small and quite inadequate head. They are two or more weeks old, and they leave their parents, or their parents leave them, I do not know which. If socialism be the nationalization of the means of production and distribution, then they are socialists. They divide into parents and children. The adult community comes up from the open sea, bringing food inside them: they are full of half-digested shrimps. But not for their own children: these, if not already dead, are lost in a crowd of hungry tottering infants which besiege each food-provider as he arrives. But not all of them can get food, though all of them are hungry. Some have already been behindhand too long: they have not managed to secure food for days, and they are weak and cold and very weary.

"As we stood there and watched this race for food we were gradually possessed with the idea that the chicks looked upon each adult coming up full-bellied from the shore as not a parent only, but a food-supply. The parents were labouring under a totally different idea, and intended either to find their own infants and feed them, or else to assimilate their already partially digested catch themselves. The more robust of the young thus worried an adult until, because of his importunity, he was fed. But with the less robust a much more pathetic ending was the rule. A chick that had fallen behind in this literal race for life, starving and weak, and getting daily weaker because it could not run fast enough to insist on being fed, again and again ran off pursuing with the rest. Again and again it stumbled and fell, persistently whining out its hunger in a shrill and melancholy pipe, till at last the race was given up. Forced thus by sheer exhaustion to stop and rest, it had no chance of getting food. Each hurrying parent with its little following of hungry chicks, intent on one thing only, rushed