One moonlight night a little later, while we were traveling under short sail with considerable ice about, a whale blew a short distance to windward. I was at the wheel and Mr. Landers was standing near me. "Blow!" breathed Mr. Landers softly. Suddenly the whale breached--we could hear it distinctly as it shot up from a narrow channel between ice floes. "There she breaches!" said Mr. Landers in the same low voice, with no particular concern. We thought the big creature merely was enjoying a moonlight frolic. It breached again. This time its body crashed upon a strip of ice and flopped and floundered for a moment before sliding back into the water. Then it breached half a dozen times more in rapid succession. I had never seen a whale breach more than once at a time, even when wounded. Mr. Landers became interested. "I wonder what's the matter with that whale," he said. To our surprise, two other black bodies began to flash up into the moonlight about the whale. Every time the whale breached, they breached, too. They were of huge size, but nothing like so large as the whale. "Killers!" cried Mr. Landers excitedly. Then we knew the whale was not playing, but fighting for its life. It leaped above the surface to a lesser and lesser height each time. Plainly it was tiring fast. When it breached the last time only its head and a small portion of its body rose into the air and both killers seemed to be hanging with a bulldog grip upon its lower jaw. What the outcome of that desperate battle was we did not see. The whale and its savage assailants moved off out of eye-shot. But for some time after we had lost sight of the whale we could hear its labored and stertoreous breathing and its heavy splashes as it attempted to breach. Killers, Mr. Landers told me, are themselves a species of rapacious, carnivorous whale, whose upper and lower jaws are armed with sharp, saw-like teeth. They are otherwise known as the Orca gladiator, and tiger-hearted gladiators of the sea they are. The great, clumsy bowhead with no teeth with which to defend itself, whose only weapons are its flukes and its fins, is no match for them. They attack the great creature whenever they encounter it, and when it has exhausted itself in its efforts to escape, they tear open its jaws and feast upon its tongue. The killer whale never hunts alone. It pursues its titanic quarry in couples and trios, and sometimes in veritable wolf-like packs of half a dozen. There is usually no hope for the bowhead that these relentless creatures mark for their prey. CHAPTER XXII THE STRANDED WHALE