224 WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 



It is almost incredible, there is a feeling of movement to- 

 day, the 17th July, quite a perceptible sense of pitch and 

 roll. You notice it even without looking. The living move- 

 ment of the sea for ten days we have been " in the ice," 

 with smooth water. How welcome is this open water. A 

 clear road lies before us to Greenland why should the ice 

 this year lie across our track in such fields, making us take 

 fifteen days for a distance we expected to cover in four ? 

 Perhaps it was as well we met it; though there were no 

 whales there were at least bears, so we have their valuable 

 skins and seal blubber, and our two live bears to make up 

 our cargo. They bring rather an unpleasing aroma at times 

 into the pure Arctic air. Their cages are in parts becoming 

 more and more thick, with stumps of the two-inch battens, 

 which they have eaten their way through. We begin to 

 wonder how to get one of them across from Tromso to 

 Edinburgh, for it would be awkward if they eat their way 

 through on a passenger steamer. Mem : Keep on practising 

 lasso and throwing hitches and pistol practice. 



At three this morning, twenty minutes to three to be 

 exact, and in Don Jose's watch, we spotted a bear on the 

 great floe we were hanging about yesterday ; a bear and two 

 cubs, probably the bear of yesterday, and he and Gisbert 

 went off armed cap-a-pie, and the writer could not but be 

 amused at the old lady's cleverness, though it was at the 

 expense of our companions. It was a mile away, but with a 

 fine glass every movement could be followed, and with no 

 glass to aid its sight it could apparently follow our move- 

 ments. It stood up its full height, craned its neck to one 

 side or the other, then got on all-fours and spoke to its cubs, 

 and they set off up wind, then it turned round, took another 

 spy at our friends, who soon looked like little black dots 

 amongst the waste of floe, ice hummocks and pinnacles, 

 little lakes and shallow valleys, and as they pursued their 

 way steadily to where the bears had been seen, it made a 

 wide sweep to their left and got away farther even than we 

 could follow it from the mast. I made a jotting from the 

 telescope as per over page, which gives an idea of the kind 

 of going. 



