Fish, Fiords, Falls, and Forests

HAVE you a good imagination? I mean, when there are clouds in the sky, can you see giants or galloping horses or rabbits with long ears or other things? Then look at the map on page 260 and tell me what it looks like:

Turn it on the side. Do you see what I see? A WHALE, with his mouth open, ready to swallow little Denmark. Skagerrack and Kattegat are the whale’s throat.

My geography calls this whale the “Scandinavian Peninsula”—that’s a big name, but then a whale is a big animal. The geography calls the back of the whale Norway, and it calls the other side Sweden. Norway plus Sweden equals Scandinavian Peninsula.

Perhaps the reason I thought of a whale was because there are so many real whales in the sea near Norway. Now a whale is the largest fish there is, you know, only it isn’t a fish.Fish lay eggs as chickens and birds do, only much smaller and many more, but a whale mother doesn’t lay eggs. She has babies as a cat has kittens. Besides, a whale has to have air to breathe and must come up to the top of the water as you would have to do if you were swimming under the water. A fish wouldn’t do that, for he couldn’t do that, so you see a whale is not a fish.

The whale eats little fish called herring, lots of them at one gulp, bones and all. There are millions, billions, trillions of herring in the sea, and millions, billions, trillions more than that.They live together in enormous crowds called “schools,” but one school of herring has more pupils than all the schools in the World; so, although the whales eat some herring, there are plenty of herring left for us to eat.