206 SOLITARY OLD BULL. 



felt perfectly certain of this one, and I resolved 

 not to fire, but to allow the harpoon to do the 

 business ; when we got to ten or twelve yards' 

 distance, however, the brain of the walrus was 

 so beautifully developed, that I could not 

 resist the temptation of firing, and I accord- 

 ingly shot him through the back of the head, 

 but, to my unspeakable vexation and disgust, in 

 the act of dying he gave a convulsive half-turn 

 backwards, and the edge of the ice giving way 

 underneath him, he sank like a shot, only, as 

 it were, a quarter of a second before the har- 

 poon swisJied into the water after him. This 

 mishap was my own fault, and I bitterly 

 anathematised my own impatient folly in 

 firing when it was not the least necessary. 



We next found in succession three large 

 seals, and I killed them all ; we secm'ed two, 

 but lost the third from the edge of the ice 

 giving way beneath him in his dying convul- 

 sion, precisely in the same way as with the 

 last walrus. 



After rowing for an hour or two more, we 

 found two lots of walruses on ice about an 

 English mile apart ; one lot consisted of four 

 and the other of five, and all were bulls of the 

 first magnitude. We took the former first, 



