292 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



And thus it continued intermittently for four months. There 

 were days when the Vikna simply banged straight ahead; there were 

 others when she would back and fill, lurch madly from side to side, 

 clang, shudder, belch black smoke, and end up drifting in a whirling 

 sea of bloody foam. But the end was always the same, another red 

 and black flag drifting off abaft. There was something utterly re- 

 lentless about her performance, even when she suddenly spun about 

 at midnight and charged off on another course, zigzagging for days 

 among quite unseen currents and other sea obstacles, gathering up 

 the flagged corpses with unerring skill and unfailing accuracy like 

 some supernatural steel terrier. Even when towing a line of these 

 monstrous balloons into the sound, there was nothing proud or even 

 majestic about her. She remained always just a horrible, overefficient 

 hunk of insensible metal, a sort of latter-day djinn temporarily re- 

 leased from Captain Olsen's private store of bottles. The last the 

 Boy saw of her was an angry plume of dirty brown smoke curling 

 from beyond the horizon. Then he rose from the mossy sod and 

 tramped back home with leaden feet. 



Although man is essentially a land animal, his ancestors — which 

 is to say, "apemen," and probably even their progenitors, the "men- 

 apes" — have dwelt upon, or at least visited, coasts since time im- 

 memorial. The earliest of our line were doubtless indistinguishable 

 from various other "apes," and they behaved accordingly. They 

 literally grubbed for their food, and they would seem to have rel- 

 ished seafood then just as they do today, in common with many 

 other creatures, such as the Japanese macaque monkey. Tropical 

 forests do not abut on to the seashores, so the true apes, such as the 

 gorilla, chimpanzee, and orangutan, have no opportunity to go fish- 

 ing or clamming. Nevertheless, these creatures relish the natural salts 

 found in fish and other marine products just as much as do any other 

 animals. Man's earliest ancestors were terrestrial creatures more like 

 baboons, as opposed to arboreal animals like the apes, and they wan- 

 dered about the earth and must from time to time have reached 

 foreshores. There they doubtless dipped into pools and sampled 

 whatever moving thing they could grasp in their hands. 



This brief flight into the field of anthropological speculation is. 



