A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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walrus
The walrus is a very large seal-like mammal of the Arctic with tusks in both sexes, a thick moustache of stiff sensitive whiskers, and enough bulk to reach two tons. It feeds on the bottom, hoovering clams out of the sediment by rooting with the whiskers and sucking the flesh out of the shell with enormous force. The tusks are used for hauling out onto ice, for display, and for fighting.
Etymology
The word came into English from Dutch and behind it is a Norse compound generally read as whale-horse, with the two elements swapped somewhere along the way. Old English had the unswapped form, horschwæl, horse-whale, and the Scandinavian languages still use versions of it. The Latin genus name means, roughly, tooth-walker, from the way the animal levers itself onto ice.
Notes
The whiskers do the work. A walrus has several hundred of them, each independently supplied with nerves and muscle, and it locates and identifies buried clams entirely by touch in water where visibility is nil. Ivory from the tusks was one of the great trade goods of the medieval north and much of the material in European carving before the elephant ivory routes opened is walrus.