216 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



concerted rush towards the bear, putting their weights simultane- 

 ously against the toggles, they broke. Tied together as the dogs 

 were, the bear would have had them at a great disadvantage had 

 he stopped to wait for them, but as soon as he saw them coming he 

 fled, making for the water as a bear always will when he thinks 

 himself in danger. About five yards from shore the young ice 

 broke under him. He did not dive, but started trying to struggle 

 up on the ice, breaking some more of it. The dogs rushed up but 

 had the sense not to go in the water. 



Storkerson and Ole, out of the tent by this time, saw the great 

 danger to the dogs, each one of which was of priceless value to us. 

 They accordingly began to shoot, although instructions were that 

 no bear was to be killed in the water, as the meat would have been 

 difficult to retrieve. Only the head of the bear was showing much 

 of the time, and partly because of this and partly because of ex- 

 citement, it took a fusillade to kill him that used up more ammuni- 

 tion than we could afford. It was justifiable, however, to do any- 

 thing that increased the safety of our dogs. 



When this shooting began I was about half a mile from camp. 

 As one shot after another rang out I grew more and more worried. 

 My companions knew as well as I did that our lives and our suc- 

 cess might depend upon the careful husbanding of ammunition. 

 Yet there was Ole standing up and wastefully shooting from the 

 shoulder like a cowboy firing at Indians in a movie. My momen- 

 tary anger at this extravagance changed quickly to relief when I 

 got home and saw what a narrow escape the dogs had had. 



Since leaving the shallow waters in the vicinity of the coast of 

 Alaska we had been taking a sounding once every forty or fifty 

 miles and invariably getting one resultr— 1,386 meters with no bot- 

 tom. This was the full length of our line — about four-fifths of a 

 mile — and it was a continual source of grief to me that the acci- 

 dental breaking of the wire in earlier soundings had left us unable 

 to reach bottom. It had been a theory with many geographers 

 that the ocean north of Alaska was shallow, its bottom an extension 

 of the continental shelf with a consequent average depth of under 

 400 meters and a concomitant probability of numerous islands stud- 

 ding this shallow sea. But instead of the "continental shelf" we 

 had below us "oceanic depths," and at least one ground for expect- 

 ing to find new lands in this unknown sea was gone. 



At the lead which stopped us we had not taken a sounding im- 

 mediately, for we had not traveled far from our last sounding, 

 but on the second day we sounded and got bottom for the first time 



