198 WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 



the black nose and black soles of his feet as he stretches 

 himself, and scrapes a bed in the snow for his midday 

 siesta. 



With the glass I see Archie get into soft snow and stoop 

 and point the rifle and get up, and I wonder why, when he 

 does this again, and I swing my glass on to the bear and 

 notice a flush come over its yellow back, and there is a spout 

 of red from its side ; though I see so clearly I hear no sound 

 of the shot. Five times Archie hit his Majesty, all in more 

 or less deadly places, but he came on and girned at them 

 and wanted to chaw them up, a fighting bear. Five 

 350 magnum bullets shattering bone and muscle actually 

 knocking over the big beast, yet not destroying its fight, 

 gives an idea of the muscle of such a full-grown snowy 

 chief. He measured, as he lay, eight feet two inches 

 that is, from nose to tail ; standing up on his bare feet, 

 he would have stood ten and a half feet and his estimated 

 weight was one thousand and twenty pounds. As our 

 estimate was founded on steelyard weights of many other 

 bears and their measurements, this may be accepted as 

 correct. 



Personally, a foot or a point or two about a beast, or a ton 

 or two's weight in a whale does not matter to me very much, 

 it is the fun of the stalk that counts be it for a rabbit, bear, 

 or fingerling trout, the dew on the clover or the icicles on 

 the berg and how you get your beast, and what you see 

 on the way to it, for things get impressed on memory by the 

 excitement of a stalk, in a way they would never be at other 

 times. If you have to crawl, for example, through a shallow 

 blue pool on a snow-field in the early morning, as was my 

 experience to-day, to get within shot of a bear that suspects 

 you, you note the queer blue tint of the pool that soaks 

 through your waistcoat that it is sometimes blue, and 

 sometimes purple, depending on the angle at which the light 

 strikes the ice crystals under or on its surface. And there 

 is plenty of time to speculate why you do not see such pools 

 on the floes in the Antarctic. 



From the ship when we spotted the bear alluded to above, 

 and until it was killed, in fact, we thought it was very large, 



