A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 96: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

96 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY knots, scratching fleas after seal fashion. This time the job was pretty simple. I just had to work along between the little herd of seals and the nearest water edge. From that position, if they were still un- alarmed when I started to shoot, I might even bag all six before they could get to the water. So when I was about four hun- dred yards from the herd, I got down on hands and knees and crawled along, and when I was still closer, I wormed my way along, seal fashion. T WAS a lot more difficult to hunt six - than to hunt one. Because this was not a regular herd; these fellows seemed to be together only by accident. In a regular herd, watch will be kept, probably, by one or two duly appointed members, while the others enjoy a good snooze, but all six of these fellows were popping up their heads, and there were few times when I could catch them all with their heads down. It was while I was lying prone, playing seal, and pretending to scratch fleas with my elbows, that I first saw the killer whales. There was a whole school of them —a dozen, I should say, and by the look of the long dorsal fins cutting the water, they were all adults. That made me feel perfectly certain of my seals. They had seen those fins cut- ting the water, I could be sure, and much as they feared bears on land, they feared killer whales in the sea still more. Orca Gladiator, to call him by his dressed-up name, thinks nothing of swal- lowing half a dozen seals one after the other. He swims like a streak; he has a pair of jaws capable of smashing a small boat with one bite; and he fears nothing in the seas except the great sperm whale. I watched the long fins cutting the wa- ter with a hiss of spray about them, and a moment later, I decided that I had reached the right spot. I was beginning to feel a touch of pity for those poor seals, seeing that they had rifles to face on shore, and devils waiting for them in the water. I gave one look toward the sea, and saw that the whales had disappeared and raised myself to one knee, ready for fast and accurate shooting. But I did not pull the trigger. For just then it seemed as if a salvo of cannons had been fired from the bottom of the sea. The ice broke up all around me, with a great roaring and smashing sound, and up | through the broken ice, close to the seals, shot the projectiles that had smashed the thin sheet—the killer whales ! I saw thirty gleaming feet of one of them go into the air with that vast stretch of mouth closing on the body of a seal. I saw the red spurt of that seal’s blood. And then the whole: school went down out of sight. But still, as I leaped frantically from one block of ice to another, trying to get back to the main island, those night- mares rushed half a body’s length out of the water to get a luckless seal. Some- times they missed and turned in midair to snap at another. It was frightful; and I was right in the middle of it. I might not be a seal, but I knew that the appetite of Orca Gladiator does not pause for such fine distinctions. I had just jumped from one bobbing little iceberg and managed to get on the verge of a much more substantial chunk when a gleaming, dripping giant shot up, and a vast mouth clapped together scant inches from my head. I heard the gush of air expelled by the clapping of those jaws, and I saw the tiger gleam in the eye of the killer as it threw itself at me. Into the water beyond me he crashed, and threw up a mass of spray all over me, and drenched me to the skin. On hands and knees in the middle of my ice cake, I remained sweating and trembling, cling- ing sickly to the glassy surface. The killer did not try me again and I did not stay long on my little floe. I started hopping again from one to an- other, using the rifle as a balancing staff. And in a moment more, very weak in the knees, very giddy in the head, I stood again on the rim of the island. Even there I did not pause, but ran as fast as I could straight inland. For one of the Orcas, or the whole school of them, might decide to top off seal-meat with man’s flesh, and I preferred to stay away from that particular banquet. I sat down and got some of the shud- ders out of me; it was bitterly cold. And though sea water drying and freezing on your body is not so deadly as fresh water, still it’s bad enough. So I turned and started back at a fast GOMIIGoOO S C@