THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 309 



few moments you reassure him of your sealship by raising and 

 dropping your head, rolling and wriggling as if itchy, and by flexing 

 your legs from the knees as if scratching with hind flippers — all 

 this lying flat on the ice with your side towards the seal and never 

 allowing him to see your long arms, for a seal's front flippers are 

 short. If you ^re careful, if the snow is not crusty so it crunches, 

 if a moderate wind from the direction of the seal covers any 

 noises there may be, you can crawl as near him as you like. I 

 have known Eskimos to crawl right up to a seal and seize him by 

 a flipper with one hand while they stab him with a knife with 

 the other. But they do this only rarely, either "for a stunt" or else 

 because they have not the proper hunting gear with them. Ordi- 

 narily an Eskimo hurls his harpoon from a distance of from ten 

 to thirty feet. I ordinarily shoot from a distance of twenty-five 

 to seventy-five yards. 



An Eskimo, using his native gear, holds the harpooned seal 

 by the harpoon line. With a rifle only a brain shot will serve; 

 for if the seal is not instantly killed he will crawl to the water 

 and dive. The reason why I hardly ever shoot at as much as a 

 hundred yards is that the seal is lying on an incline of ice beside 

 the hole or lead. There are few things so slippery as wet ice and 

 the mere shock of instant death may start him sliding and the 

 blood from his wound may get under him, lubricating the ice and 

 making him slide faster. The seal in most cases has buoyancy 

 enough to float. But in sliding towards the water he acquires 

 momentum enough to take him down diagonally ten or twenty 

 feet. He then comes up diagonally under the thick ice and you 

 can't get him. Fearing this, I always drop my rifle the moment I 

 fire and run as hard as I can towards the seal. In some cases he 

 does not slide at all and I slacken speed on getting nearer; in 

 others he is sliding, gradually gaining headway, and I slide for 

 him like a player stealing a base in baseball. In some cases I have 

 caught the seal by a flipper just as he was disappearing; in others 

 I have been. too late and the seal, though stone dead, has been lost. 



A good hunter should get sixty or seventy per cent, of the seals 

 he goes after. The approach takes on the average about two hours. 



Readers of antarctic books may wonder, "Why all this to-do 

 about just the right way to hunt seals?" Their idea is that you can 

 secure a seal any old way. So you can — in the Antarctic. Down 

 South the seal knows no enemy, for there were no predatory animals 

 till the explorers came. Fear is consequently unknown to them and 

 if you walk up to a seal and scratch him he will roll over so you 



