THE AKCTfC BEAK. 467 



swims towards boats or sliips, until driven back by shots. 

 When glutted with the enjoyment of fat seals it varies its 

 diet by ducks' eggs, and a few hours is quite enough for 

 it to clear a small island entirely. 



It is certainly hard for the Arctic traveller to be 

 exposed to the tender mercies of a bear's two-inch 

 incisors ; but a gun, and a pocket filled with cartridges, 

 are a much more simple process than dragging a dead 

 seal about after one. If you are unarmed, the slightest 

 movement disquiets the bear, and provokes him to action. 

 But it is a much more serious matter to meet him in the 

 darkness, and be mistaken for a seal, a mistake only 

 cleared up when it is too late. If you are armed, the 

 coolness of his adversary inspires the bear with a certain 

 amount of respect. 



But the bear also deserves our compassion. His life is 

 one continued pursuit of food, although he is protected 

 from the cold by a layer of fat several inches thick. Once 

 we found in the stomach of one that had belonged to a 

 besieging corps (which during the whole of the winter 

 and spring had watched the frozen ship closely, and had 

 forced us to be wonderfully cautious), nothing but a 

 flannel lappet, which our tailor had thrown away, and in 

 the case of many others it was quite empty. Sometimes 

 the stomach of a dead bear contains nothing but water, 

 and large pieces of sea- weed {Laminaria), so that hunger 

 compels it to eat herbs. It is certainly no trifle in this 

 world of frost, cold, and darkness, with its horrible 

 snow-storms, that mountains only can offer sufiicient 

 obstacles to his wanderings for food amidst the chaotic 

 crowding and towering ice-fields, surrounded by fissures, 

 or floating out to sea on an ice-floe. Certainly its brown 



II h 2 



