THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 307 



groups among whom it is not in use. But in any case you can 

 learn from the seals themselves, for your task is but to imitate 

 them. Take your field glass with you and spend a few hours or 

 days in watching basking seals from a safe distance. With seals 

 that is 400 or 500 yards. In the books of the nature fakers ani- 

 mals are sometimes endowed with marvelously keen sight. I 

 think it is true of many birds; and mountain sheep see well, 

 though I doubt that they see as well as a man. Of the remaining 

 "big game" animals known to me, the wolf has the keenest sight 

 and yet conditions of visibility have to be favorable to him if he 

 can see you at much over 500 or 600 yards. Neither a grizzly nor 

 a polar bear is likely to see you at more than half that, nor are 

 polar cattle, while a caribou may see you at 400 or 500 yards. A 

 seal is not likely to see you at much over 300 yards. 



Your cue is, then, to begin playing seal when you are about 

 300 yards away. Up to that point you advance by walking bent 

 while the seal sleeps and dropping on your knees to wait motion- 

 less while he is awake. But at less than 300 yards he might notice 

 you on all fours, and as that is not a seal-like posture you must 

 begin to wriggle ahead snake-fashion. You must not crawl head-on, 

 for a man in that position is not so convincingly like a seal as he 

 would be in side view. You must therefore crawl side-on, or craw- 

 fish fashion. 



You crawl ahead while the seal sleeps and you lie motionless 

 while he is awake. Had you been upright or on all fours he might 

 have noticed you at 300 yards but now he does not till you are 

 perhaps 200 yards away. When he first sees you his actions are 

 plainly interpreted — he becomes tense, raises his head a little 

 higher, crawls a foot or two closer to the water to be ready to dive, 

 and then watches you, intent and suspicious. If you remain mo- 

 tionless, his suspicions increase at the end of the first minute, and 

 before the third or fourth minute are over he plunges into the water, 

 for he knows that no real seal is likely to lie motionless that long. 

 Therefore, before the first minute of his watching is over you 

 should do something seal-like. You are lying flat on the ice like 

 a boy sleeping on a lawn. The easiest seal-like thing to do is to 

 lift your head ten or fifteen inches, spend ten or fifteen seconds 

 looking around, then drop your head on the ice again. By doing 

 this half a dozen times at thirty or fifty-second intervals you will 

 very likely convince your seal that you are another seal. 



But some seals are skeptical. If yours seems restive and sus- 

 picious it is well to increase the verisimilitude of your acting by not 



