CHAPTER XVIII  GOD MADE FRIENDSHIP

 The place was as populous as a town. That was the soul-satisfying fact which she absorbed as she sat with the bundle and axe beside her. To be lonely here one would have to be deaf and blind and without the sense of smell. Now that their attention was no longer strained by watching her the great brutes filled the place with all sorts of sounds, grunts and grumbles, puffs and snorts like the escape of steam from a locomotive and now and then the flop of a great body changing position. There was another sound she got to know and recognize, after a while, the grumbling and rumbling of their interiors. Infested with sea-lice they were always scratching. Quite close to the cave mouth three great bulls were lying and every now and then one of them would turn and twist round and scratch himself with his flippers, the nearest bull had lost an eye in some past battle and they were all scarred about the necks, and seen close like this, in their natural state and as one of their company, the marvel of them, was beyond speaking.

She took off the oilskin coat and laid it on the sand of the cave, took the things from the blanket and spread the two blankets out and folded them. As she moved about she saw that the bulls had turned slightly, attracted by her movements, but they shewed not the slightest sign of mind disturbance. Then, having placed the things in order, she came out and walked down to the water's edge, making a detour now and then to avoid treading on the flippers or the tail of a monster. On coming amongst them a few minutes ago she had felt not the slightest fear, but this walk in cold blood from the cliff to the sea edge made her hold her breath. She felt as she had felt that first day when she sat down close to them. Angry, and with a sudden movement, one of these creatures could have destroyed her as a man destroys a fly; but she held on, and was rewarded.

Not one of them shewed any wish to destroy her, or anger, or uneasiness. They had accepted her into their company by not attacking or ejecting her, she ran counter to none of their desires or needs and evidently her form called up no recollections of the beast Man in their dim brains.

Then she was a female. Sex is more than a physical difference between one being and another, one can fancy it as one of the outstanding signs of the Wild to be read by instinct, as instinct reads the weather or season signs, or the sea mile posts that lead the seals and sea elephants thousands of leagues to strike some particular beach as an arrow strikes the bull's eye of a target.

The female, unless with young, is not dangerous to the male. One may fancy that amongst the few but burningly important warnings and directions in the book of Instinct.

Here, at the sea edge and within a few feet of the breaking waves, she sat down on a projecting rock and tried to measure with her eye the vast herd. The whole beach from where she sat to where the flat rocks ceased a mile and a half away on her right was spotted with them an