Chapter 4 "The White Seal" Summary

"White Seal" opens in a place called Novastoshnah, or North East Point, in the Bering Sea, near Alaska. The reader is told that this is a folk tale told to the narrator, an old fisherman, by a winter wren. People rarely go to Novastoshnah, except for fisherman and seals. It is said that the point is the finest place for seals in the world. The reader meets Sea Catch, an old male seal and a summer inhabitant of Novastoshnah. He returns to the point every year, no matter how far he must travel.

Sea Catch is a fifteen-year-old seal, old by seal standards. He is scarred from his nose to his tail fin from years of fighting for his little section of land on which to raise his cubs. Land is hard to come by...