CUTTING OUT, MAY, 1851.
"O
N the 11th, I was well enough, or imprudent enough, to attempt a seal hunt. Our mean temperature had sunk to 19° 5\ and the snow-crust was strong enough to bear. A gale had swept away the loose, fleecy drifts of the fortnight before, exposing the familiar surface of the older snow. I walked over it as I did in April.
“Reaching the seat of the open water to the northward, I found it closed by young ice, an extensive surface frail and unsafe. About a quarter of a mile from the edge of the old floe, almost in the centre of this recent lead, was a seal. The temptations of the flesh were too much for me: I ventured the ice, crawled on my belly, and reached long-shot distance.
“The animal thus laboriously stalked was large; a hirsute, bearded fellow, with the true plantigrade countenance. All his senses were devoted to enjoyment: he wallowed in the sludge, stretched out in the sunshine, played with his flippers, lying on his back, much as a heavy horse does in a skin-loosening roll. I rose to fire—and down he went. An unseen hole had received him: a lesson for future occasions. This hole was critically circular, beveled from the under surface, and symmetrically embanked round with the pulpacious material which he had excavated from the ice.
“Crawling back less actively than I had approached, my carbine arm broke through, carrying my gun and it up to the shoulder. It was very well, all things considered, that my body did not follow; for I was on a very rotten shell, and nearly two miles from the brigs, alone.
“Wednesday, 12. For the last fortnight, our ice-saw, under Murdaugh’s supervision, has been hard at work. To-day we have a trench opened to our gangway.