Adrift in the Ice-Fields

by Charles Winslow Hall

Scarcely two miles of tortuous winding through channels of perfectly calm water, led them into a pool in which hundreds of large seals were disporting themselves, but which, on seeing the boat, scattered in all directions, after a moment of stupidly curious exposure to the fire of the intruders.

"How lucky it is that these animals don't know their own power!" said Waring. "If they chose they could soon upset the boat, and tear us in pieces."

"Not without losing at least half a dozen of their leaders, and that is generally sufficient to deter hundreds of men, whose reasoning powers are much superior to these amphibia," said La Salle.

Passing into a narrow channel, in which at every turn they came close upon swimming and sleeping seals, they suddenly swept up to the verge of a vast and heavy field, on which thousands of the young of these animals lay in helpless inability to move. Most of these were what are called "white-coats,"—fat little things, covered with a thick coat of woolly fur,—but a few had attained their third week of existence, and wore their close-laid fur, whose silvery, sword-like fibres, when wet, lie flat and smooth as glass.

Among the smaller fry were many adult animals, both male and female—the latter being generally engaged in suckling their young.

The landing of the hunters was the signal for a general stampede, and the monotonous whining of the "white-coats" was almost lost in the deep barking of the mothers, and the hoarse roars of the large males.

The floe on which the young seals lay was a thick field of ice, whose clear, greenish sides showed that it was the product of some Greenland glacier. Years ago, when first detached from the ice-river of some tortuous fiord, it had perhaps measured its depth in hundreds of yards; and even now, judging from its height above the surface of the sea,—about eight feet on the average,—it must have drawn nearly eight fathoms of water.

The party had landed on a kind of sloping beach, probably worn by the action of the sun, and what is even more destructive, the wash of the sea-waves, and ascending found that the floe was nearly level for an area of at least half a square mile, forming a kind of ice-meadow, surrounded on three sides by sloping hills twenty feet higher. In the sheltered valley thus formed lay at least a thousand seals, old and young, of several species, and all ages.

There were, here and there, pairs of the small Greenland seal (Phoca Vitulina), weighing from forty to sixty pounds, and marked on the back with beautiful mottlings of black, shaded down to the silvery white of its spotless breast. These, when disturbed near the edge of the floe, slid noiselessly into the water, going down tail foremost into the depths. Most plentiful of all were the "springing seals," (Phoca Hispida),—known sometimes from its markings as "the harp,"—less beautiful in form, and with hair of a dusky yellow on the under side. These, when near the slope, sprang headlong into the water, and, diving with a splash, came up in shoals, darting forward with a springing motion, and emerging and disappearing much like a shoal of porpoises.

Larger, coarser, and with crested heads, long bristles, and harsher hair, the "bearded seal" (Phoca Barbata),—the noblest quarry of the Newfoundland sealer, who always speaks of him as "the old hood sile,"—crawled with uncouth but rapid shuffling motions to the brink, and with splashings that threw the spray high in air, dived at once, only emerging when almost beyond rifle range, where rolling, and splashing like whales, the uncouth monsters would turn to inspect the strange intruder.