WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 213 



below decks. I think they should be up and doing, for the 

 sky is lifting and the snow ceased and there is more and more 

 animation amongst our bird neighbours. The ivory gulls 

 find it is breakfast-time and suddenly set to work, pecking 

 at pieces of meat they barely glanced at an hour ago. There 

 is a promise of movement possibly of our finding a way 

 through the purple leads, through these sheets of ice-floes to 

 Greenland in the west. Yes, there is more colour now, the 

 white night is changing almost unnoticeably, and the ivory 

 gulls begin to call before they take another flight (they 

 speak just like our sea-swallows or terns, a tweet, tweet). 

 On first seeing an ivory gull you are not greatly impressed ; 

 it is simply an entirely white gull. But you recall Arctic 

 travellers mentioning it, and the little pause they make after 

 its name ; and when you see them yourself you realise what 

 that means . . . that little creamy white body that reflects 

 the grey of the sea under its wing, or the blue in the pool on 

 ice-floes, its inconsequent floating white flight is the very 

 soul of the Arctic. As closely associated with the ice-edge 

 there is another white bird in the Antarctic, the snowy 

 petrel, a delicate white spirit bird, a never-to-be-forgotten 

 touch of white delicacy in the almost awful beauty of the 

 Antarctic floe-edge, a small bird, white and soft as a snow- 

 flake, flitting amongst white and Doric ruins on the edge of 

 a lonely sea. Here the white counterpart is a larger, a more 

 material creature on the edge of a shallower, less impressive 

 ice-pack, but the kinship is there. 



How I wish it was breakfast-time ! two more hours before 

 our " much too strong she-cook" will give usfrokost. 



At this point in these meditations we came across another 

 bear ; we had let go our floe and were heading north-west, 

 the day clearing (bump ! that was ice), when we spotted him 

 on a small floe, across which he sped at a good speed. At first 

 we thought it was small enough to take with lasso and keep 

 alive, so we chased it, but it proved on close acquaintance 

 to be an old she-bear, and far too big and strong to rope, 

 so we dispatched it with my 38 Colt pistol with one 

 shot in the centre of its white head at ten yards, which 

 killed it stone dead, much to the astonishment of crew, who 



