The Seal Did Not Forget
A long time ago, Magnus Muir was gathering limpets on the shore on the west side of Hacksness in Sanday, when he heard from some place among the rocks a very curious sound. The sound was so very pitiful that it made Magnus uneasy and lonesome.
He searched for the source of the sound. At first he saw only a large seal quite near the rocks, thrusting its head above the surface of the water, and looking with both eyes into an inlet a short distance away. Magnus noticed that the seal was not afraid; it never dived, and never ceased to gaze at the inlet.
Magnus crossed over a large rock which lay between him and the place. There, in a corner of the inlet, he saw a mother seal lying in the throes of her calving pains, moaning and bellowing loudly. The father seal lay in the sea watching his mate in her trouble. Magnus stood and watched her too, and he said it was pitiful to see what the poor animal suffered.
He stood there, a little way off, until she calved two fine seal calves. Magnus thought to himself that the skins of the calves would make him a splendid waistcoat, and ran to where all three were lying.
The poor mother seal rolled over the edge of the rock into the sea, but the two young seals did not have the wit to get away. So Magnus seized them both. But the mother seal in the sea below was so anxious about her young that he rolled round and round in the sea and beat herself with her paws. Then she would climb with her forepaws on the rock and gaze into Magnus" face with such a pitiful look that it might melt a heart of stone. The father seal was acting in the same way, but he would not come so dose to Magnus.
Magnus turned to go away with the two young seals in his arms – they were sucking his jacket as if they were at their mother's breast – when he heard the seal mother give a groan that was so like a groan of a human being that it went straight to his heart and quite overcame him. He looked around, and saw the mother seal lying on her side with her head on the rock, and he saw – as certainly as he ever saw anything on earth – tears brimming from both her eyes.
This was more than he could stand. So he bent down and placed both the young seals on the rock. The mother took them in her paws and clasped them to her bosom, just as if she had been a human mother with a child. And she looked right into Magnus" face. What a glad look she gave him!
Magnus was then a young man; and some time afterward he married. And a long time after he was married, when his children had all grown up, he went to stay on the west side of Eday. One fine evening, Magnus went to fish for coal-fish off an outlying rock. It was an isolated rock that was covered at high tide; you could only walk to it dry-shod at low water. The fish wouldn't take for a time; but when the flood tide began, the fishing became so good that Magnus stood and pulled in the fish until he had quite filled his creel.
With the fish taking so well, he forgot in his eagerness the path he had to take. And when