266 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



minutes at a time instead of thirty seconds, there soon 

 would be no seals left. They would all get killed and 

 eaten by the polar bears. 



The polar bear is the great enemy of the seal. He 

 is white in color and difficult for the seal to see at a 

 distance. He is also a very skillful hunter. Eternal 

 watchfulness is, therefore, the price of a seal's being able 

 to live at all. Accordingly, he usually goes to sleep on 

 large expanses of level ice so as to give the bear no 

 opportunity to creep up behind the cover of a hummock. 

 Then after the briefest nap, during which the seal sleeps 

 like a small boy on a lawn, he lifts his head as high as 

 he can above the ice (about eighteen inches) and surveys 

 the whole horizon carefully. Having satisfied himself 

 that nothing dangerous is in sight, he takes another nap. 

 While the average nap is thirty seconds, the seal may lift 

 his head suddenly after five seconds of pretended sleep, 

 or possibly after a real nap of fifteen seconds. They 

 seldom sleep more than a minute at a time, but north of 

 Prince Patrick Island, where we never saw polar bear 

 tracks, I have known them to sleep five or even ten 

 minutes at a time. 



All these things I had heard already, but I wanted 

 further confirmation of them and I wanted to learn 

 certain finer details of how to act. Watching the seal 

 through my glasses, I noticed that he was seldom still for 

 a moment. He was continually squirming and rubbing 

 himself against the ice as if he were itching. Occasion- 

 ally he would scratch his side with one of his front flip- 

 pers. The front flippers are short and inconvenient for 

 that purpose, but the hind flippers are long and flexible 

 and he can curl himself up in such a way that he can 

 scratch with them as far up as his waist. I concluded, 



