200 WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 



The stalk and trying to sit up on the snow crust to draw 

 a bead on the light primrose fur of the soft-looking beast, 

 how vividly that will make all the delicate mother-of-pearl 

 tints of the ice scene remain in my memory ! 



It is a wonder that animal painters, some of them quite 

 distinguished, do not as a rule take the trouble to go and 

 study their animals in their proper surroundings. What 

 numbers of pictures we see of snow-leopards, bears, and such- 

 like, done excellently up to a point, but with none of their 

 natural atmosphere. The white bear with its pale primrose 

 colour needs the shimmer and pearl-like tints of its natural 

 surroundings, the blues and greens of the floe, veiled a little 

 by fine snow or mist, and the hard ice, to set off its rounded 

 soft furry form that hides such terrible strength. How 

 could anyone, for example, hope to paint a caribou, with its 

 glory of russet horns, unless he has seen its grey face and 

 white neck amongst silver birch stems and the red glow of 

 maples ? 



To do the ice-bear justice, you should first splash on to 

 canvas the shimmer of mother-of-pearl, then inset the comic 

 kicked-on-the-hind-quarter figure in yellow, give the humour 

 and preserve his strength and majesty at the same time, so 

 you'd have a masterpiece. At a school or zoological garden 

 or museum you can learn anatomy and painting, but out- 

 side work is essential for the true animal painter. There 

 he must forget bones and muscles and get the envelope of 

 air and colour of the animal and its surroundings. 



But to come back to our bear-hunting. As our party 

 returned from the hunt, the men spread out left and right, 

 covering about a mile, and so roped in a younger bear, which 

 had been hanging about to leeward of the old male bear which 

 Hamilton shot. Why it did so we cannot say. It was 

 cheery work for the men, running about as beaters sometimes 

 do at a drive when a hare gets up and tries to get back. It 

 was a little shy of them, but did not seem to mind the ship ; 

 in fact it came right up to us and we got a boat down. It 

 then tried to run down the floe edge and outflank beaters, 

 but Larsen, a long, fair-haired, blue-eyed fellow, got ahead 

 and fired bullets into ice in front of its nose range about 



