SUMMER JOURNEYS AND FERTILITY. 33 



screaming and behaving generally as if the end of the world had 

 come. They flew straight at us, and we expected every moment 

 to have them in our eyes ; but at the last moment, when they 

 were so near that we could have touched them, they suddenly 

 wheeled straight into the air again, almost brushing our caps as 

 they did so. A visit of this kind is amusing enough for a few 

 minutes, but it also has its disagreeable aspects, as I, who was 

 walking first in a red cap, was especially made to feel. These 

 terns were exceedingly badly behaved birds, and I heard Peder, 

 who was walking behind me, laughing till I thought he would 

 split. What my cap and clothes looked like after we had beaten 

 an ignominious retreat to the boat, baffles all description. 

 We rowed from land as hard as we could, but the terns followed 

 us for some distance, screaming till we could not hear our own 

 voices in the boat; their cries were so piercing that they literally 

 made our ears ache. 



One day when we were dredging in the outer- part of the sound 

 we noticed a bear lying on a large floe, which was about a mile 

 in length. We decided to have the bear ; and accordingly rowed 

 out of the sound alongside Skreia, and put the boat into a lane 

 between the floe and the edge of the fast ice, in order to get 

 the bear inside our course and prevent it from escaping along 

 the edge of the ice into Jones Sound. It proved to be a she- 

 bear, with a rather large cub ; we saw the latter plainly lying 

 asleep. 



As luck would have it, we were rowing down wind, but there was 

 nothing to be done. We knew we should alarm the animals, but 

 we hoped to get a shot at them all the same, if only we could 

 keep them inside of our course, where there was open water. 

 Even if they took to land we looked upon their capture as certain ; 

 but we knew that they would make a desperate effort to reach the 

 fast ice, and we therefore took our time up the sound, rowing 

 under land. 



We even went in pursuit of a bearded seal on the way, shot it, 

 and took it with us. It was lying a good distance from the 

 bears, so that the report of the rifle did not alarm them ; though 

 animals in the region of the Arctic seas are so used to the cracking 



VOL. II. D 



