212 Frits Johansen. 



the water by shuffling alternately torward with the hind flippers 

 and to the side, sometimes with the one front flipper, sometimes 

 with the other. It was astonishing to see the large, clumsy animals 

 moving away so rapidly; in a moment they were out in the water, 

 so that the foam was all over them (see Fig. 5). 



The animals naturally go up on to the land or ice to rest 

 themselves and in a short time they fall asleep. They are very 

 drowsy especially after a heavy meal ; they stretch themselves, belch 

 and scratch well-pleased their sides and stomach with their flippers 

 (in doing this they move their hind flippers especially with great 

 ease), and roll on their backs to dry their bellies in the sun. When 

 they are sleeping they are not wakened even by the noise of a 

 motor boat, or they merely lift the head and soon lay it down 

 again. If the danger is more pressing it is almost comic to observe 

 how they struggle between their sleepiness and watchfulness ; they 

 move their head to smell the direction of the wind, rise up and 

 bellow, but they are unable to suppress a yawn, and the head 

 threatens all the time to fall asleep. Just as the hearing is obviously 

 weak the sight is also apparently weakly developed; they see nothing 

 until one is quite close to them, and if one now and then stands 

 still, they are quite unable to distinguish between a man and a 

 rock, so that we could get to within a couple of steps from a walrus 

 crawling up on land before firing the gun. Things are quite different 

 in the water, on the other hand; even though their powers of 

 seeing and hearing are the same here, their watchfulness is quite 

 different and their movements active; and if wounded they are 

 dangerous about a boat. This refers especially to the males, and 

 just as elsewhere here in North-East Greenland these keep together 

 in herds of up to 10 (when, as already mentioned, the ice does not 

 prevent it), both older and younger animals; while the females 

 are encountered singly, and apparently, much more seldom. These 

 latter have, as known, converging narrow tusks sloped and spatulate 

 at the end (a female of 300 cm. had tusks of 29 and 32 cm. in 

 length, at a distance from one another above of 11 cm., below of 

 6 cm.), whereas those of the male diverge and are much thicker at 

 the base than at the tip. The hairy covering of old animals 

 tends to be more brownish than in the young animals (in which 

 it is almost green-black) \ but all the animals shot had marks of 

 the tusks of their comrades, in the form of wounds and scratches 

 in the dense hairy covering, and on their bellies were numerous 

 intercrossing furrows caused by stones on the sea bottom. As evidence 



' This difference in coloui' is most evident when tlie animals are seen from some 

 distance. 



