162 ADVENTURES IN THE NORTHERN SEAS. 



I was, however, grievously disappointed at finding 

 that they had only shot eight reindeer during the 

 whole four weeks in which they had had nothing 

 else to do, although they had been lying in Bell 

 Sound, which is considered the best place in all 

 Spitzbergen for geese and reindeer. They had also 

 carefully eaten all the hind quarters of the deer 

 themselves, and had left nothing but ten lean fore 

 quarters for us ! Geese had they none, but they 

 had managed to kill some hundreds of eider-ducks ; 

 from the fact of there being no drakes among them, 

 I concluded these had been killed on their nests. 

 It was a long time before they had succeeded in kill- 

 ing a deer at all, and said that, but for the eider- 

 fowl and their eggs, of which they had found great 

 numbers, they would have been obliged to go over 

 to Hammerfest for provisions. They admitted that 

 they had found the deer "very difficult to hit ;" and, 

 as they could make nothing of the breech-loading 

 rifle, they had been obliged to make bullets for the 

 shot-gun, which I had also lent them, by cutting a 

 piece of wood round at the end, and then boring 

 holes in the sand, into which they poured the lead, 

 and then beat these plugs into a spherical shape. 

 The bullets manufactured by this ingenious process 

 must have considerably improved the bore of my 

 gun by the attrition of the sand attached to them. 

 They stoutly maintained having killed several seals, 

 but "they had all sunk. 1 ' 1 Seal not being very good 

 "grub," I doubted whether much time had been de- 

 voted to the chasse of that animal. 



