2 9 o HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



to circle until I came upon the animal or else upon its 

 tracks. 



I was still thinking that the bear was ahead of me and 

 was clambering down from a high ridge when I heard 

 behind me a noise something like the hiss of an angry 

 goose. From this point I shall tell the story as I wrote 

 it down many years ago in my book "My Life With the 

 Eskimo." 



My rifle was buckled in its case slung across my back, and 

 I was slowly and cautiously clambering down the far side of 

 a pressure ridge, when I heard behind me a noise like the spit- 

 ting of a cat or the hiss of a goose. I looked back and saw, 

 about twenty feet away and almost above me, a polar bear. 



Had he come the remaining twenty feet as quietly and 

 quickly as a bear can, the literary value of the incident would 

 have been lost forever; for, as the Greek fable points out, a 

 lion does not write a book. From his eye and attitude, as well 

 as the story his trail told afterward there was no doubting his 

 intentions: the hiss was merely his way of saying, "Watch me 

 do it!" Or at least that is how I interpreted it; possibly the 

 motive was chivalry, and the hiss was his way of saying Garde! 

 Whichever it was, it was the fatal mistake of a game played 

 well to that point; for no animal on earth can afford to give 

 warning to a man with a rifle. And why should he? Has a 

 hunter ever played fair with one of them? 



Afterward the snow told plainly the short — and for one of 

 the participants, tragic — story. I had overestimated the bear's 

 distance from shore, and had passed the spot where he lay, 

 going a hundred yards or two to windward; on scenting me 

 he had come up the wind to my trail, and had then followed 

 it, walking about ten paces to leeward of it, apparently fol- 

 lowing my tracks by smelling them from a distance. The rea- 

 son I had not seen his approach was that it had not occurred 

 to me to look back over my own trail ; I was so used to hunting 



