CAPE SALOR TO LOCKWOOD'S BEACON 



furthermore, it is an expert in the art of teasing. As soon as 

 we approach, long before we can get within range, it dives 

 down through its breathing-hole ; but hardly have we turned 

 towards land before it crawls up again, repeating this comedy 

 every time we continue the hunt. 



We cannot understand the reason for the seals being so 

 uncommonly shy here, where no hunting takes place. The 

 fact that they are very few in number may probably sharpen 

 their attention towards every unusual sound, more so than in 

 other places where they gather in greater numbers ; and up to 

 this time we have merely seen one single seal at a time. 

 Neither are there any ice-bears here to hunt them ; if the bears 

 exist at all, they are so few in numbers as to be insignificant ; 

 otherwise it is not our experience that these make the seals shy, 

 for in Melville Bay, where the ice-bears yet have their El 

 Dorado, the spring seals are tamer and less nervous than any- 

 where else in Greenland. 



Joe and Hans Hendrik made the same discovery during the 

 "Polaris " expedition, and it seemed to them so strange that 

 the seals should disappear through their breathing-holes at the 

 slightest creak even from a very long distance, that they com- 

 municated to Hall their supposition that human beings must 

 exist in the neighbourhood. 



From land we had watched a couple of seals attentively 

 through our glasses before we started hunting them. When 

 in the South of Greenland a seal crawls up on the ice to sleep, it 

 rolls about in the snow for a quarter of an hour before it 

 stretches out with its head on the ice, falling into a sleep so deep 

 that, with care, one can as a rule get within range without 

 waking it. But up here the seal remains quiet only a few 

 minutes at a time, then it will raise its head and look search- 

 ingly in all directions, just as if it were continually expecting 

 an ambush of some kind or other. Thus we have come to the 

 conclusion that it is the great and sudden pressures of ice which 

 have made them so timid and nervous ; for if a pressing-up, 

 due to the exertion of ice masses from outside, is commenced 

 suddenly and without warning, the little cleft where the seal 



143 



