111.] 
THE WALRUS. 
153 
warn their comrades when danger is near. If necessary pre¬ 
cautions are observed, i.e. if the hunters approach the beach 
where the animals are assembled when the wind blows from the 
land, and kill with the lance those that lie nearest the water, the 
rest are slaughtered without difficulty, being prevented by the 
carcases of their dead comrades from reaching the sea. Now 
such an opportunity for the hunter happens exceedingly seldom ; 
there are famous headlands on which in former times the 
walrus was found by hundreds, in whose neighbourhood now not 
a single one is to be seen. 
In the sea too there are certain places which the walrus 
principally haunts, and Avhich are therefore known by the 
hunters as walrus-banks. Such a bank is to be found in the 
neighbourhood of Muffin Island, situated on the north coast 
of Spitzbergen in 80° north latitude, and the animals that have 
been killed here must be reckoned by thousands. Another bank 
of the same kind is to be met with in 72° 15' north latitude, on 
the coast of Yalmal. The reason why the walruses delight to 
haunt these places is doubtless that they find there abundant food, 
which does not consist, as has often been stated, of seaweed, but 
of various living mussels from the bottom of the sea, principally 
Mya truncata and Baxicava rugosct. Their fleshy parts are freed, 
before they are swallowed, so remarkably well from the shells, 
and cleaned so thoroughly, that the contents of the stomach 
have the appearance of a dish of carefully-shelled oysters. In 
collecting its food the walrus probably uses its long tusks to 
dig up the mussels and worms which are deeply concealed in 
the clay.^ Scoresby states that in the stomach of a walrus he 
found, along with small crabs, pieces of a young seal. 
1 Compare Malmgren’s instructive papers in the publications of the 
Royal (Swedish) Academy of Sciences and Scoresby’s Arctic Regions, 
Edinburgh, 1820, i., p. 502. That the walrus eats mussels is already 
indicated in the Dutch drawing from the beginning of the seventeenth 
century reproduced below, page 160. 
