HABITS AND THE CHASE. 117 



you see a hundred grisly heads and long gleaming white tusks 

 above the waves ; they give one spout* from their blow-holes, 

 take one breath of fresh air, and the next moment you see a 

 hundred brown hemispherical backs, the next a hundred pair of 

 hind flippers flourishing, and then they are all down. On, on, 

 goes the boat as hard as ever we can pull the oars ; up come 

 the Sea-horses again, pretty close this time, and before they can 

 draw breath the boat rushes into the midst of them: whish! 

 goes the harpoon : Mrr ! goes the line over the gunwale : and a 

 luckless junger on whom Christian has kept his eye is 'fast 7 : 

 his bereaved mother charges the boat instantly with flashing 

 >eyes and snorting with rage j she quickly receives a harpoon in 

 the back and a bullet in the brains, and she hangs lifeless on 

 the line: now the junger begins to utter his plaintive grunting 

 bark, and fifty furious Walruses are close round the boat in a 

 few seconds, rearing up breast high in the water, and snorting 

 and blowing as if they would tear us all to pieces. Two of these 

 auxiliaries are speedily harpooned in their turn, and the rest 

 hang back a little, when, as bad luck would have it, the junger 

 gives up the ghost, owing to the severity of his harpooning, and 

 the others no longer attracted by his cries, retire to a more pru- 

 dent distance. But for the < untoward ' and premature decease 

 of the junger, the men tell me we should have had more Wal- 

 ruses on our hands than we could manage. We now devote our 

 attention to < polishing off' the two live Walruses well-sized 

 young bulls who are still towing the heavy boat, with their 

 two dead comrades attached, as if she were behind a steam-tug, 

 and struggling madly to drag us under the icebergs : a vigor- 

 ous application of the lances soon settles the business, and we 

 now, with some difficulty, tow our four dead victims to the near- 

 est flat iceberg and fix the ice-anchor, by which, with the pow- 

 erful aid of block and tackle, we haul them one by one on the 

 ice and divest them of their spoils. . . . 



" While we were engaged in cutting up these Walruses, there 

 were at least fifty more surrounding the iceberg, snorting and 

 bellowing, and rearing up in the water as if smelling the blood 



*It is, perhaps, almost needless to say that the "spouting" here referred 

 to is merely the spray thrown upward by the forcibly expelled breath as they 

 rise to the surface, although a "spouting from their blow-holes" has occa- 

 sionally been attributed to them since the time of Martens, who says they 

 " blow water from their nostrils like a whale." See on this point von Baer 

 (1. c., pp. 139-147), who has discussed the matter at length in his above- 

 cited memoir on the Walruses. 



