Then, lifting her enormous tail straight in the air, she dived slowly downward into the pale, greenish glimmer of the deeper tide, the calf keeping his place cleverly behind her protecting flipper.
"Down here the minute life of the ocean waters swarmed more densely than at the surface.

Swimming slowly, the mother whale filled her mouth again and again with the tiny darting squid, till she had strained out and swallowed perhaps a ton of the pulpy provender.

As they felt the whalebone strainers closing about them, each one took alarm and let fly a jet of inky fluid, as if thinking to hide itself from Fate; and the dim green of the surrounding water grew clouded till the calf could hardly see, and had to crowd close to his mother's side.
A twist or two of her mighty flukes, like the screw of an ocean liner, drove her clear of this obscurity, and carried her, a moment later, into a packed shoal of southward journeying capelin." The Babe's mouth opened for the natural question: "What's capelin ?" But Uncle Andy got ahead of him.
"That's a little fish something like a sardine," he explained hastily.
"And they travel in such countless numbers that sometimes a storm will throw them ashore in long windrows like you see in a hay field, so that the farmers come and cart them away for manure.

Well, it did not take long for the old whale to fill up even _her_ great stomach, when the capelin were so numerous.

She went ploughing through the shoal lazily, and stopped at last to rub her little one softly with her flipper.
"All at once she caught sight of a curious-looking creature swimming just beneath the shoal of capelin, and every now and then opening its mouth to gulp down a bushel or so of them.