Page:They who walk in the wilds, (IA theywhowalkinwil00robe).pdf/78

 tide-wash kept scoured. It was a fruitful breeding place for huge, coarse clams and mussels, and innumerable crustaceans large and small. In fact, it was swarming with shoal-water life, and hence was an ideal pasturage for the herds of the walrus. Scattered all over the teeming bottom, the hungry monsters grubbed up the mud with their tusks, or with the same efficient weapons raked the rockloving shellfish from the ledges, rarely troubling to crush the hard morsels between their irresistible jaws, but preferring to gulp them down whole, shell and all. And if they swallowed quantities of mud and small stones at the same time, that did not trouble either their undiscriminating palates or their incomparably hardy stomachs. Above them, as they fed, the sunlight glimmered down greenly through the tranquil tide; and the silver-bellied cod and hake and pollock, singly or in shoals, darted hither and thither in confusion, while the fat and sluggish flat-fish—plaice and flounder and fluke—disturbed in their feeding on the mud, flounced up indignantly and glided off to serener pasturage.

Suddenly among the bewildered shoals of cod and pollock appeared a gleaming and terrible shape before which they all scattered like plover before a goshawk. Some sixteen or seventeen feet in length, slender and sinister, and with a keen lance about two feet long standing straight