AND MANATEES 



Then a special use of the long tusk is made apparent ; as 

 the animals cannot remain under water altogether, they 

 charge upwards at the ice, and gradually succeed in 

 breaking open a breathing-hole, which they keep free 

 from the continually re-forming ice. It is at these holes 

 that the Greenlanders find their narwhal fishing-grounds ; 

 sometimes they are numerous, sometimes there will be 

 only one in a space of several square miles. 



The fishermen collect in great numbers round the hole, 

 every one armed with either a gun or a three-pronged 

 fork, and before they have been waiting long the suffocat- 

 ing animals appear in hundreds. The " catching " is a 

 wholesale massacre ; the men with the guns fire as fast 

 as they can, while the harpooners drive their weapons 

 into the dead or dying bodies and pitchfork them into 

 heaps on the ice. 



The Greenland men have none of the Icelanders' 

 scruples about eating the narwhal ; in fact, they regard 

 the flesh as a great delicacy. They cut up the 

 carcass into joints, which they smoke as we should 

 smoke bacon. 



Before we proceed to the vegetable-eating delphinidse, 

 there are two other animals we must notice the Caaing 

 Whale and the Beluga, or white whale, both of them 

 ardently pursued by the northern fishermen. The caaing, 

 which the Scotch fishers call the black whale, used invari- 

 ably to be classed by naturalists with the dolphins, but it 

 is now generally regarded as a separate cetacean species. 

 Sailors often call it the howling-whale and the pilot-fish, 

 though why the latter it is difficult to say, unless on 



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