David Thomson, raised among Scottish fishermen and storytellers, was obsessed from childhood by the Celtic seal legend - the body of tales and songs about the "selchie, " or gray Atlantic seal." "In the early 1950s he took a journey to seek the legend out, in the Hebrides, on the east coast of Scotland, on the west coast of Ireland, in the Shetlands and the Orkney Islands - places where magic co-exists with reality and where pe-Christian traditions and beliefs somehow endure.