ARCTIC HUNTING 



close to you, and the difficulty is enormously increased by the 

 back of the head being so imbedded in fat as to appear as if 

 it were part of the neck. This 

 will be understood by a refer- 

 ence to the plate. If you hit 

 him much below that spot, you 

 strike the jaw-joint, which is 

 about the strongest part of the 

 whole cranium. A leaden bullet 

 striking there, or on the front 

 of the head, is flattened like a 

 piece of putty, without doing 

 much injury to the walrus ; and 

 even hardened bullets, propelled 

 by six drachms of powder, were 

 sometimes broken into little 

 pieces against the rocky crania 



of these animals. 



What becomes of the wal- 

 rus in the winter it is hard to 

 say, but I have heard them 

 blowing in an open pool of 

 water among the ice on the 

 north coast of Spitzbergen in 

 the month of December. In 

 the spring, however, when the 

 ice begins to break up, they 

 collect in herds on their feed- 

 ing grounds around the coasts, 

 where they may be found diving 

 for shellfish, or basking and 

 sleeping, singly or in ' heaps ' 

 of two or three (often five or 

 six) together. They seem to 



prefer to lie on small cakes of flat bay ice ; a single walrus will 

 often take his siesta on a cake only just large enough to float 

 him, and it is among such ice therefore, rather than among 



Where to shoot a walrus 



