An Exciting Polar Bear Bunt. 



163 



the writer had two lumps in his, and was too busily engaged trying 

 to swallow them, at that moment, to utter any lengthy sentences. 

 The others were no better off, and, of course, silence reigned in our 

 camp for at least half a minute. That half minute brought, with its 

 close, unspeakable relief, solid relief, born of the fact that these 

 fearful-looking brutes had not observed us. 



There we lay like fine, helpless babes, no one daring to raise the 

 hammer of his rifle. The bears were within easy rang'j, but they 

 were completely out of danger. The guns were trusty and powerful ; 

 the charges were deadly ; 

 we were all good shots ; 

 the bears were in excel- 

 lent position, just far 

 enough from one another 

 so that each man could 

 pick outhis mark. Every- 

 thing was favourable, 

 but we didn't shoot ! Not 

 a bit of it. Why ? be- 

 cause we didn't feel like 

 shooting bears of that 

 sort. They were not the 

 kind we expected to find 

 at all — not according to 

 contract ; and we had a 



perfect right to back out there and then, and we backed out accord- 

 ingly. 



They were five or six feet longer than the bears we had come to 

 kill ; they must have weighed over a thousand pounds avoirdupois 

 each, and we didn't go up among these rocks to interfere with bears 

 that would weigh more than three or four hundred pounds. One 

 of them opened her mouth to yawn a little in the sun, and her jaws 

 were more than eighteen inches long, and we didn't want bears with 

 jaws more than six inches long; another raised himself up on his 

 hunkers, and stuck his sneaky-looking nose up into the air about 

 eight feet, and every man of us knew that we didn't want a bear 



A POLAR BEAR. 



