HOW WE HUNT POLAR BEARS 291 



bears that the possibility of one of them assuming my own 

 role and hunting me had been left out of consideration. A 

 good hunter, like a good detective, should leave nothing out 

 of consideration. 



In 19 14 we were traveling over the moving ice pack 

 north of Alaska. The ice in that vicinity was composed 

 of islands, most of them several miles in diameter, and 

 some of them as much as twenty or thirty miles in dia- 

 meter, although a few were no larger than a city block 

 and others even smaller. Like real islands, these were 

 separated by water, but they were different from ordinary 

 islands in being in continual motion and in bunting against 

 each other as they moved. The motion was so very slow 

 that it was scarcely perceptible, and when the islands 

 collided, there was no shock that would knock you off 

 your feet but merely a quiver and a groaning, grinding 

 noise as one island crushed and broke the edges of an- 

 other. The ice that made up the islands was of varying 

 thickness, in few places less than three or four feet, and 

 in many places as much as fifty or a hundred feet. The 

 fifty or hundred-foot ice is not produced by continuous 

 freezing, as in a lake, but rather by having thinner ice 

 broken up and one cake heaped upon another until they 

 are piled ten, fifteen or twenty layers deep. The differ- 

 ent ice pieces later freeze together, making solid masses of 

 great thickness. 



Traveling over such ice we usually found a place where 

 the corner of one island touched the corner of another, 

 giving us a chance to cross over. But in one place we 

 found that our island was not touching any other ice 

 ahead of us. The water lane between us and the next 

 island was only a dozen or two yards across and seemed to 



