144 HUNTING IN THE ARCTIC 



"Do we have to get out?" asked Kleinschmidt excit- 

 edly as he stepped on board. 



"No; why?" answered the mate, who was on watch. 



"We heard you blow the whistle and had a dickens of 

 a time to push through the ice." (A whistle was the 

 recall signal for boats if it became too dangerous for the 

 ship in the ice.) 



"No, we didn't whistle." 



What all of them in the skin boat had heard was 

 never found out. 



Two black serrated spots a few miles westward were 

 marked from the masthead and after dinner the "Abler" 

 tied up to an ice block within a half mile of them. From 

 the rigging I could see the flash of large tusks among the 

 smaller lot of walrus, so Lovering and I paddled the 

 kayaks round several flat cakes, bending very low to 

 escape detection, and emerged on a pan hardly thirty 

 yards away. I put a fatal shot in the back of the big 

 fellow's head and flattened out two more, then told 

 Lovering to shoot, as he so far had only two. The rest 

 were moving fast by this time and he got only one small 

 one. There had been seven or eight on the ice. Our 

 four shots, within thirty minutes after leaving the ship, 

 had each told a fatality, but we could see the animals 

 apparently still breathing, though they lay perfectly 

 quiet and to every appearance dead ; so we hurried across 

 and shot them all over again to make sure. It took four 

 hours to skin the scalps, cut off the heads and hoist these 

 and the enormous bodies on board. The largest meas- 

 ured eleven feet, one inch from the end of his nose along 

 the back to the end of the body, to which length the 

 flippers added two feet, and bore heavy tusks protruding 

 twenty-six inches from the gums. The total length of 



