On an island called Novastoshnah in the Bering Sea, a fierce and battle-hardened seal named Sea Catch meets with his wife Matkah after a long season of fighting over territory with other seals. Matkah scolds her husband for his constant fighting, and Sea Catch tells her that despite the overcrowding, they must return to Novastoshnah island or else people will think he is a coward. Sea Catch and his wife have a baby together who is called Kotick. Kotick has a white coat of fur, unlike other baby seals. As he grows up, he learns about the ocean and how to hunt from his parents, until he eventually returns to the beaches of Novastoshnah as a “holluschickie,” or juvenile seal. Kotick and his friends see a group of Aleut seal hunters led by a human named Kerick Booterin, who sees Kotick’s white fur and believes that he must be the ghost of a drowned hunter named Zaharrof.

Kotick decides to follow the hunters, who are nervous about him because they think he is a ghost. He watches as the hunters kill the other holluschickie seals on the beach and then he flees back to sea. He talks to a sea lion who tells him that Kotick and other human hunters have been hunting juvenile seals on the beach for at least 30 years now.