CHAPTER XXXIII 



FINDING no whales and being unable to get on to 

 Greenland, for some twenty miles of ice now separate 

 us from its shore, we decide to turn back. 

 Right about wheel then, for we are sick of eternal flat ice- 

 floes. If we had a new boiler, new coal supply, new food 

 supply and unlimited time, we would hang on. The ice may 

 open in ten or twelve days, but we arranged to finish our 

 hunting, if possible, at Tromso, Norway, about the middle of 

 August. So we, have just time and no more to get there by 

 that time, granted there is fine weather and little fog. 



But as I write, seven P.M., we are again into a fog bank 

 and have to tie up to a floe. It is thin fog, and sun shines 

 through it and we hope it will lift. So it is good-bye to our 

 chances of whales, musk oxen, or walrus, for walrus we can 

 only get along the coast in shallow soundings. One whale, 

 and that only a narwhal, is our poor basket. We must 

 console ourselves with having got a fair number of bears in 

 the time seventeen in the month, one narwhal and a lot of 

 seals. It will not pay, but we may yet get bottle-nose down 

 about Jan Mayen Island, if the drift takes us southerly in 

 that direction before we get out of the ice easterly. 



Perhaps I may here be allowed to put down some notes on 

 the protective coloration of the Arctic fauna. 



Evening of the 2nd August. We thought we were in for 

 another bear this evening, because a young man on watch prob- 

 ably mistook a piece of yellow ice for a bear, and we went back 

 on our tracks, but found no bear. We hunted round the floe 

 on which he vowed he had seen it, but did not find even spoor, 

 so I fear his cry of " Wolf " will not be listened to for many a 

 day. Naturalists tell us that the yellowish tint of the bear's 

 skin is given to it by Nature to allow the bear to secure its 

 prey, the seal that the seal is green enough to mistake the 

 bear's skin for a piece of yellow ice, and thus the fittest 



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