Walrus

The Walrus is presented as a collective sea creature and, in the episode at Walrus Islet, as the old leader known as Sea Vitch. Kotick seeks him because he wants an answer to a practical and desperate question: whether any shore exists where seals can live without men coming to kill them. The Walrus does not solve that problem, but his indifference helps define the limits of the older order Kotick is trying to challenge.

Habitat and Physical Presence

The Walrus lives apart from the seals on Walrus Islet, a low, rocky island lying almost due northeast of Novastoshnah. The place consists of ledges, rocks, and gulls’ nests, and the walruses herd there by themselves. Its separation from the seal beach gives the group a distinct social space, one that Kotick must reach by a six-mile swim.

Sea Vitch, the particular Walrus Kotick approaches, is described as a huge, ugly, bloated, pimpled, fat-necked, long-tusked animal of the North Pacific. He has poor manners except when asleep, and when Kotick finds him, his hind flippers are partly in and partly out of the surf. The physical description makes him seem less like a graceful guide than an entrenched, cumbersome authority: powerful, conspicuous, and entirely at home in his own rough territory.

Encounter with Kotick

Kotick reaches Walrus Islet after an older sea creature advises him to ask Sea Vitch whether he knows of a safe island. Kotick first hauls out on his own beach and sleeps for half an hour before setting out, a small practical detail that places his determination within the bodily demands of marine travel. When he arrives, the gulls are making such a commotion that he must wake Sea Vitch.

Sea Vitch’s awakening spreads through the herd by blows. He strikes one walrus with his tusks, that walrus wakes the next, and the disturbance passes along until the group is awake and staring in every direction except the right one. The scene turns the herd’s size and physical power into comic disorder rather than heroic solidarity.

Kotick identifies himself as a little white seal and asks whether there is a place where seals can go that men never visit. Sea Vitch responds with contempt, telling him to go and find out and to run away because the walruses are busy. The answer is not a reasoned refusal; it is a refusal to take Kotick’s crisis seriously. The Walrus treats the young seal’s search as an interruption to established comfort.

Authority, Mockery, and Advice

Kotick refuses to leave without an answer. He insults Sea Vitch as a clam-eater, mocking the fact that the old walrus never catches fish and instead roots for clams and seaweed while pretending to be terrible. The gulls seize on the insult, repeating it for nearly five minutes until the island becomes a chorus of shouting and screaming. Sea Vitch rolls from side to side, grunting and coughing, while the birds turn his authority into public entertainment.

Only after this uproar does Sea Vitch provide useful information. He tells Kotick to ask Sea Cow, if Sea Cow is still living, because Sea Cow may know where such a refuge can be found. The advice is terse and indirect, but it redirects Kotick’s quest from the unhelpful elder at Walrus Islet toward the elusive creature who may possess knowledge of safer waters.

The Walrus therefore occupies an ambiguous position. He is not an enemy of Kotick, and he does not defend the human killing of seals in the exchange. Yet he initially responds to the slaughter’s consequences with the same weary detachment shown by many older seals, who tell Kotick that men have always driven the herds and that he should grow up instead of trying to stop it. Sea Vitch’s mockery and delay dramatize how inherited experience can become passivity when a younger member has directly witnessed violence.

Contrast with Kotick’s Search

Kotick’s question arises from what he has seen at the killing grounds, whereas the other seals dismiss his concern partly because they have not seen the killing themselves. His white coat also marks him as unusual. Against that background, Sea Vitch’s refusal becomes part of a broader contrast between those who accept danger as ordinary and the individual who treats it as a problem requiring migration, investigation, and change.

After leaving Walrus Islet, Kotick returns to Novastoshnah and finds that no one sympathizes with his attempt to discover a quiet place. Sea Vitch’s advice nevertheless remains a crucial link in the search. Kotick follows it by continuing his solitary exploration, eventually traveling through the North and South Pacific, swimming as much as three hundred miles in a day and a night while looking for Sea Cow and a secure island.

The Walrus’s role is thus modest but structurally important. He cannot offer sanctuary, and he does not share Kotick’s urgency, but his single direction keeps the search moving. In a story shaped by seasonal movement, threatened beaches, and the search for habitat beyond human reach, the Walrus represents a stationary community whose knowledge is valuable even when its sympathy is absent.

Narrative Significance

The Walrus episode combines ecological geography with animal folklore and satire. Walrus Islet is a real social territory, marked by rocky ledges, surf, gull colonies, and a herd that maintains its own routines. Sea Vitch’s tusks, bulk, and herd authority suggest formidable strength, yet the scene repeatedly converts that strength into comic helplessness: the herd wakes by chain reaction, the gulls dominate the soundscape, and the elder is forced into an answer by ridicule.

The episode also enlarges the book’s animal-centered moral world. Elsewhere, the Law of the Jungle forbids animals to kill Man except under tightly defined conditions because human retaliation brings guns, elephants, gongs, rockets, and torches into the jungle. In the seal story, human power appears differently, through organized killing at the beaches and the repeated destruction of seal nurseries. The Walrus does not articulate a law against that violence; his silence makes Kotick’s independent initiative more necessary.

As a figure, the Walrus is memorable less for action than for resistance to action. His first response is dismissal, his social world is self-contained, and his eventual counsel is almost grudging. Yet that counsel points beyond his own island toward the hidden possibility of another habitat. Through him, the narrative shows that useful knowledge may survive inside an apparently comic or indifferent elder, while meaningful change must come from the creature willing to leave familiar shores and keep searching.