332 
THE LEAD. 
dence of open water. In this, surrounded by exhal- 
ing mist and frost-smoke, were our old friends, the seal ; 
grave, hirsute-looking fellows, who rose out of the wa- 
ter breast-high, and gazed upon us with the curious 
faces of old times. Near them was a solitary dovekie, 
dressed in its gray winter plumage, the first bird I had 
seen for days ; here, too, had crossed the tracks of a 
bear. 
All this was very cheering. To see something, no 
matter what, checkering the waste of white snow, was 
like a shady grove to men sun-tired in a prairie ; but 
to see life again — life, tenanting the desolate air and 
inhospitable sea — was a spring of water in the desert. 
My old hostility to gun-murder was forgotten. I wast- 
ed, of course, some small remnant of poetic sympathy 
with fellow-life thus springing up out of the wilder- 
ness ; but then, in the midst of my sympathies, came 
the destructive instinct which longed to make it sub- 
servient to my wants. The scurvy, the scurvy pa- 
tients, myself among the rest ! — but the seal and the 
dovekies kept themselves out of shot. 
At this lead we saw the recent frost-smoke within a 
few yards of us in pointed tongues of vapor : further 
off, the long, wreathy brown clouds were rising. I 
never before, not even in Wellington Channel, saw 
this phenomenon in greater perfection : in "Wellington 
it was an interesting, sometimes a gloomy feature; 
here it was imposing. As far back as the twelfth, we 
had caught glimpses of brown vapor in this ver.y di- 
rection : we now learned to look upon it in certain 
phases as an unerring indication of open water, and 
wondered that we did not so regard it earlier. 
The chasms were not limited to the long lead be- 
fore us. They extended to the east and west indefin- 
