WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 209 



South you pat them on the head if you like before you shoot ; 

 they do not mind your presence in the least. I find wading 

 stockings are perhaps better than sea-boots for these melt- 

 ing floes, as you go sometimes over the knees, in the blue 

 water pools and in the soft snow. Also you can turn them 

 inside out to dry, which you can't do to sea-boots. 



The seal was fairly large and had three or four awful 

 gashes, of a foot or two in length, which were put down to 

 either a bear's teeth or claws. 



It snows to-night it is dead calm, broad daylight, but 

 cold and no sun visible, floes all round and our hopes are 

 going down ; we fear we may never see Greenland's icy 

 mountains and the saxifrages and poppies that I have set 

 my heart on seeing. So we sat and sat in the silence and 

 made belief that time was passing all right, and quite en- 

 joyed a small excitement. A squeak I would not call it a 

 squeal from our " too-strong she-cook." She was cutting 

 up a piece of shark for our dinner, and suddenly noticed that 

 it responded to her touch sentience of matter, you may call 

 it. I felt it was most unpleasing for some reason it was 

 quite white flesh like halibut, and lay in a small block on the 

 bulwark rail, and when you touched it it gave a squirm or 

 movement of say a quarter to half an inch. We all collected 

 round ; and at supper we ate it, some of us did I did not 

 at least only the tiniest morsel. It began to feel rather dull, 

 so I suggested to Gisbert we should get the foils out and we 

 would fence on deck in the falling snow, and Archie would 

 photograph us and we would send the result to " Lescrime," 

 and we were just buttoning up our leather jackets for the 

 fray, when young Don Luis Velasquez put his glass up 

 at our cabin door and spotted a bear on a small floe not 

 three hundred yards away, eating seal. We thought it was 

 probably the sealskin and blubber of my morning's seal, 

 which we had let go adrift, owing to the sores the bear's 

 claws had left on it, making it dangerous for the hands 

 engaged to skin it. Pusey finger we called the wounds in 

 the Antarctic which we got from cutting up seals that had 

 been torn by a grampus. Though colds are rare in Arctic 

 regions, and consumption is said not to exist, yet often sores 

 o 



