22 ICE-BOUND ON KOLGUEV 
I landed by myself in René, in a little bay where is a 
turfed hut of the keeper—the only person on the island. 
René was more interesting to me by far than Horné, 
because it includes a much greater variety of land. The 
coast on the south side is most curiously scarped, rising 
in a series of sloping limestone slabs or terraces. The 
steps are really from ten to, say, twenty feet in height, 
and full of crevices, nice convenient places for birds to 
nest in. Beyond this is rolling grass. 
In these crevices nested the black guillemots. | 
found the sloping terraces slippery and difficult to walk 
on. But the guillemots didn’t. Far from it. They 
were so bold that they came and settled, and ran into 
their nesting holes right under my nose, as I lay down and 
looked over. And they surprised me with their activity ; 
for they lit as lightly as any pigeon on the rocks and 
ran as nimbly. You could never have guessed from 
their movements that you were looking at web-footed 
birds at all. Indeed they appeared to me remarkably 
like pigeons with extra red legs and beaks. They 
nested so low down that I could easily put my hand 
into their nests. 
I picked up a little lesser black-backed gull in the 
down, and brought him home. He was running about 
in the grass famously—head down and shoulders up, just 
as a falcon runs. 
Eiders were nesting everywhere, in every possible 
place—the sides of the cliffs, the rocks by the sea, the 
