CHAPTER XXV
I continue these bear-shooting notes this evening, Friday, 11th July. I know it is evening from a faint blush of pink on the snow that is just perceptible; without this I would have lost all idea of time, for since yesterday it has been all bear-hunting and no sleep. Now we have a bear alongside, all alive-o! He is tied with a rope and is swimming just like a man, hard astern, trying to tow our little whaler from the floe-edge; and he roars every now and then in angry disgust, and then turns up his hind quarters and dives and swims a few strokes under water, only to be pulled up again on the rope or lasso. He can swim apparently without fatigue for many hours, occasionally taking a dive as deep as the lasso will allow him. We hope to get him to our Edinburgh Zoological Park, where he will be much appreciated, especially by myself and other artists and children and seniors.
He is the last of six bears in twenty-four busy hours. Don Luis Velasquez and Don José Herrero each got their first bears, one after the other, but unfortunately both were in the water. Don José’s, the last, led us a very far chase over miles of floe and ice-covered sea.
The most fascinating part of the day was watching the bear’s abandon of movement and joy as it did its evening saunter over the floes, utterly oblivious of our presence and probably full of young seal fat and joy; when it came across the stem of a drifted pine—it was as good as a circus. How it joked with the pine log, on its back on the snow, played the guitar with it, caressed it, then spumed it in disdain with its great soft hind foot, only to take it up in its teeth again to wave it slowly about. In the middle of this solitary play, however, the bear’s seventh sense told it there was something impending and he left his cherished stick and paddled off leisurely down wind and floe—then he got the wind of the guns and went off pretty fast for a mile or so, occasionally stopping to sniff the breeze. At his easy rate of motion he quickly left Don José and his contingent behind—little black spots in the world of white plains and hummocks. Did the reader ever see a bear fairly out for a walk, and notice the extraordinary resemblance there is between the movements of a bear in the open and those of a ferret—shorten the ferret’s body and its tail and you have something very like a microscopic bear, the long back, the way they each wave their snouts and stand up on their hind-quarters to sniff the breeze—beyond doubt, it is funny. I do not think it is really undignified, but when someone says that its movements suggest its having received a violent kick on its hind-quarters, you cannot get the idea out of your mind; and whatever its sex, or however big and powerful he may be, you must smile at the way he carries his tail down. Is their strength not marvellous? A large fellow here was waiting for a seal at a hole in the ice, and a blue seal (Phoca Barbata) just showed itself, and apparently to take the chance, with one swoop of his forearm and claws, the bear threw the great six-hundred-pound seal well on to the ice, and with a forefoot on its back, broke the head off at one bite and drank the blood and wolfed up every bit of skin and blubber; for the meat or cran, and bones, the bear, like the human, has no use, unless he is hard pressed.
Of course it is a big old bear which can do such a feat, possibly twenty years old and much bigger and broader in the quarter and shoulder than you can expect to find in Europe in confinement. Archie Hamilton got such a veteran this morning, quite comfortably, after twelve-o’clock breakfast. With De Gisbert and some men they sallied forth over the floe we were up against to deprive two bears thereon of their skins and lives—that is, if the bears did not in the first instance deprive them of theirs.
It was fascinating watching the little figures growing smaller and smaller in the distance, and to watch the soft, pale yellow heap that represented the ice-bear. I have a splendid glass, and at half-a-mile can distinguish the gloriously luxurious rolls and movements of the great fellow and note the black nose and black soles of his feet as he stretches himself, and scrapes a bed in the snow for his midday siesta.
With the glass I see Archie get into soft snow and stoop and point the rifle and get up, and I wonder why, when he does this again, and I swing my glass on to the bear and notice a flush come over its yellow back, and there is a spout of red from its side; though I see so clearly I hear no sound of the shot. Five times Archie hit his Majesty, all in more or less deadly places, but he came on and girned at them and wanted to chaw them up, a fighting bear. Five 350 magnum bullets shattering bone and muscle actually knocking over the big beast, yet not destroying its fight, gives an idea of the muscle of such a full-grown snowy chief. He measured, as he lay, eight feet two inches—that is, from nose to tail; standing up on his bare feet, he would have stood ten and a half feet and his estimated weight was one thousand and twenty pounds. As our estimate was founded on steelyard weights of many other bears and their measurements, this may be accepted as correct.
Personally, a foot or a point or two about a beast, or a ton or two’s weight in a whale does not matter to me very much, it is the fun of the stalk that counts—be it for a rabbit, bear, or fingerling trout, the dew on the clover or the icicles on the berg—and how you get your beast, and what you see on the way to it, for things get impressed on memory by the excitement of a stalk, in a way they would never be at other times. If you have to crawl, for example, through a shallow blue pool on a snow-field in the early morning, as was my experience to-day, to get within shot of a bear that suspects you, you note the queer blue tint of the pool that soaks through your waistcoat—that it is sometimes blue, and sometimes purple, depending on the angle at which the light strikes the ice crystals under or on its surface. And there is plenty of time to speculate why you do not see such pools on the floes in the Antarctic.
From the ship when we spotted the bear alluded to above, and until it was killed, in fact, we thought it was very large, but it turned out to be not half the size of the big fellow C. A. H. has secured.
He and De Gisbert and I set out after it together. But the only way, I thought at the time, to get within shot without scaring it was to do a regular deer-stalk crawl of a hundred yards to get behind an isolated piece of rounded snow, just big enough to cover one person. So I left Gisbert and Hamilton behind a bigger hummock as covering party and proceeded at great leisure, ventre à terre, to approach the said piece of snow, I do not think that ursus got my wind, but possibly the noise of my elbow crunching through a hard crust of the snow drew his attention, and I saw a black eye and the dark ear of the right side of his face peering round the little lump of snow, then his black left eye looked round the other side of the hummock, and then both eyes and black nose were gently raised over the top—we were stalking each other!
From subsequent experience I have learned that my stalking was rather wasted, as a bear will always come to the attack if you are alone. I liked his expression, what I saw of it, but either he did not like mine or he got an inkling that there was a covering party in the rear, for he suddenly seemed to think of something and turned and very sedately walked away to the left, with his head down. So I, also sedately, I hope, sat up on the soft snow and pulled at his shoulder at about fifty yards, and he collapsed, and then got up and pelted away to the right, the writer following, both of us tumbling and pulling ourselves up again in the soft snow and hummock. It took other two shots (375 cordite), both fairly well placed, to end its troubles.
The stalk and trying to sit up on the snow crust to draw a bead on the light primrose fur of the soft-looking beast, how vividly that will make all the delicate mother-of-pearl tints of the ice scene remain in my memory!
It is a wonder that animal painters, some of them quite distinguished, do not as a rule take the trouble to go and study their animals in their proper surroundings. What numbers of pictures we see of snow-leopards, bears, and such-like, done excellently up to a point, but with none of their natural atmosphere. The white bear with its pale primrose colour needs the shimmer and pearl-like tints of its natural surroundings, the blues and greens of the floe, veiled a little by fine snow or mist, and the hard ice, to set off its rounded soft furry form that hides such terrible strength. How could anyone, for example, hope to paint a caribou, with its glory of russet horns, unless he has seen its grey face and white neck amongst silver birch stems and the red glow of maples?
To do the ice-bear justice, you should first splash on to canvas the shimmer of mother-of-pearl, then inset the comic kicked-on-the-hind-quarter figure in yellow, give the humour and preserve his strength and majesty at the same time, so you’d have a masterpiece. At a school or zoological garden or museum you can learn anatomy and painting, but outside work is essential for the true animal painter. There he must forget bones and muscles and get the envelope of air and colour of the animal and its surroundings.
But to come back to our bear-hunting. As our party returned from the hunt, the men spread out left and right, covering about a mile, and so roped in a younger bear, which had been hanging about to leeward of the old male bear which Hamilton shot. Why it did so we cannot say. It was cheery work for the men, running about as beaters sometimes do at a drive when a hare gets up and tries to get back. It was a little shy of them, but did not seem to mind the ship; in fact it came right up to us and we got a boat down. It then tried to run down the floe edge and outflank beaters, but Larsen, a long, fair-haired, blue-eyed fellow, got ahead and fired bullets into ice in front of its nose—range about four yards, and it got disquieted and turned back to the ship, then slipped over the floe-edge into the sea, and we rowed after it, and a sailor made a dozen poor attempts to cast a lasso over its neck; he bungled it over somehow and we towed it, using dreadful language at us, alongside, and afterwards got it on board into a cage.
The Last Cartridge
A fighting Bear.
From a Painting by the Author
I think this recapitulates our bearing for twenty-four hours rather concisely. It does not quite convey the slight chill you feel at setting out, on however beautiful and silvery a morning, at, say, five o’clock, after being up all night, to wade across ice and snow to face the horrible and dangerous Ursus Maritimus, or white monarch of the pole, and it does not give the calm sense of conceit that you feel when you have succeeded in slaughtering the same, and preserving your skin; it would be bad form to express such sentiments loud out. The only sign our Spanish friends showed was that they were a little sallow when they set out, and a little warmer in colour on their return. A. C. H. quotes Neil Munro to express his feeling. “Man,” he says, “am feeling shust sublime—could poo the mast oot o’ the ship an’ peat a Brussels carpet.” No wonder, lucky fellow, a one-thousand-and-twenty-pounder for his first polar bear. His first black bear we thought mighty big a year or two ago, away back in the barrens of Newfoundland; it weighed three hundred and eighty pounds. Which is best to eat, polar or black bear, it is hard to say. I vote for black bear pre salé and fed in the blueberry season. Still, the meat of the polar bears here is extremely good and feels strengthening. One needs strengthening. Yesterday was high summer, just touching freezing, but still and a little sunny; to-night a gale from north-east and cold, and ice driving gently round us.
But I am not complaining! No—I’ve been a summer and autumn in Antarctic ice. After the bad days and black nights there in January and February, nothing north of the Line need be considered as intolerable.
One note before winding up this day’s reckoning. If you wish to think of the Arctic or Antarctic, you must think in colour somehow or other. If you think in black and white you miss the idea, and form a wrong impression all in black and white, just as I used to have from engravings, and which it is very difficult to put aside. North Polar and South Polar regions are essentially places of very high-toned delicate colour, almost the only black is what you bring with you; mother-of-pearl and birch-bark tints you have, and grimness there is in dead earnest, dangers and minor discomforts, but it’s all in lovely colour in high note.
It is my watch and Gisbert’s to-night, but I am going to turn in after writing this; two nights without sleep make one feel inclined to ride out this gale behind a floe in one’s bunk—pipe, matches and book, and practice chanter, all within arm’s-length, and jolly comfortable it is; for, as Marcus Aurelius puts it: “If a man can live in a palace, he can live there well.”
I forgot to say we got our Bruin on board, after a terrible fight and some blood lost, human and bear’s. We got a strop round his waist when we had pulled him alongside with the lasso, and hauled him up in the air by the steam-winch, the chain and hook fast in the strop. I think this little drawing explains the method; it’s a most kindly and considerate treatment. I mention this to ease the mind of some people who concluded that a picture in this book of a bear hung by the head was a live bear being lifted on board instead of being a bear that had been shot for an attempt on our lives on the ice. Whalers and sealers and bear-hunters I have found just as humane and gentle a people as those who stay at home and often criticise them unkindly. We led the lasso under the floor bars of a big wooden cage which we made to-day; three men hauled his head down. Then we lowered him into the cage, and whilst he tried to free his head, battens were rapidly nailed on over his back. So he is on board, but not all right, it is quite possible he may pull away a batten to-night. He is busy carpentering, and has already got one spar off. I would prefer his going overboard to looking me up in my bunk.
It blew all night, so we all rested and had European breakfast at leisure at nine. I did a picture of a bear I saw yesterday, Archie’s bear. It is munching the head of a young hooded-seal, Cystophora Cristata, of which we saw over forty in one lot yesterday. I also did a picture, from notes at the time, of the jolly lonely bear playing with a piece of drift-wood, lying on its back and tossing away the wood with his hind foot, just before he got up, suspecting there was something in the wind, and before going off over the floe down wind at that easy gait that leaves poor man such miles behind whenever there is soft snow to negotiate.