How Animals Talk 



boat to approach one of them, he would disappear 

 silently before I could ever get near enough to see 

 clearly what he was doing. That seemed odd to 

 me; but presently I began to notice a more puz- 

 zling thing: at the instant my whale took alarm 

 every other whale of the same species seemed to 

 be moved by the same impulse, sounding when the 

 first sounded, or else turning with him to head for 

 the open sea. 



A score of times I tried the experiment, and 

 commonly, but not invariably, with the same re- 

 sult. I would sight a few leviathans playing or 

 feeding, shooting up from the deep, breaching half 

 their length out of water to fall back with a 

 tremendous souse; and through my glasses I would 

 pick up others here or there in the same bay. 

 Selecting a certain whale, I would glide rapidly 

 toward him, crouching low in the dory and sculling 

 silently by means of an oar over the stern. By 

 some odd channel of perception (not by sight, cer- 

 tainly, for I kept out of the narrow range of his 

 eye, and a whale is not supposed to smell or hear) 

 he would invariably get wind of me and go down ; 

 and then, jumping to my feet, I would see other 

 whales in the distance catch the instant alarm, 

 some upending as they plunged to the deeps, 

 others whirling seaward and forging full speed 

 ahead. 



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