THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
sunny as in Norway. The rivers swarmed with salmon and the shores with 
bird life and Polar bears, whilst musk ox were very plentiful. In one 
month they had killed fifty-four Polar bears and thirty-two musk ox, the 
skins of which I saw. 
Captain Jackman, one of the old Newfoundland seal hunters, with 
whom I travelled recently, told me that one year he went with his vessel 
to Jan Mayen, and passed through the ice break to the coast of E. Green- 
land. Here he got “ jammed ” and could not get out the whole summer, so 
conceived the bold idea of driving with the current right down the coast. 
This he succeeded in doing, coming out at Cape Farewell in October. In 
some of the bays, he said, the number of Polar bears feeding on the young 
hooded seals was extraordinary. One morning he observed from the 
“crow’s nest,” in the whole of the head of one bay that was quite clear of 
ice, such numbers of Polar bears that they resembled a flock of sheep. At 
one moment forty-two bears were seen feeding or walking on the floes. 
The brown bear ( ursus arctus) of Europe is still found (though in rapidly 
diminishing numbers) in Russia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Galicia, 
Poland and Hungary. It is said to still exist in the Austrian Tyrol, though 
probably now extinct in Switzerland and Italy, whilst a few eke out a pre- 
carious existence on the western side of the Pyrenees. 
Until the year 1880 bears were fairly numerous in Norway, and a sports- 
man who desired to shoot one had a fair chance of doing so; but now the 
case is altogether different, for the animal has been so relentlessly hunted 
by the young Norse peasants on “ski” that it has become very rare. 
Between 1846-1870, 5,176 bears were killed in Norway, which gives an 
average of 207 per annum, whilst between 1871-1895, 2,457 bears were 
killed, an average of ninety-eight per annum. In 1903, fifty were killed. 
In 1905, only twenty-three were killed in all Norway, and in 1906 nineteen, 
ten being killed in Kristians and Nordland and not one in Trondhjem. 
These figures speak for themselves. 
The districts most frequented by bears in Norway were Buskerud, 
Bratsberg, Nedenaes, Romsdal, North Bergenhus, North Trondhjem, 
Nordland and Finmarken. 
A few bears are still to be found in Bratsberg (Thelemarken) and Sseters- 
dal, as well as in Kristians, Buskerud, Romsdal, North Trondhjem and 
Finmark, but the chances of seeing one nowadays are remote unless the elk 
hunter is very fortunate and spies one by chance. The late Sir Henry Pot- 
tinger only killed one in the course of all his Scandinavian experiences. 
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