Note 1. The shoulder of the seal is the bear’s favourite tit-bit, and I have seldom seen him eat more of Miss Phoca, when sport was good and provisions (seal) plentiful—G.S.
Note 2. There are winters and winters in Greenland. Sometimes for two or even three months together the darkness is deep and depressing, the whole country shrouded in a night that seems never-ending.
Chapter Fifteen.
Paddy’s Adventure with the Bear—Fun on the Ice—The Little Purple Cloud.
Tobogganing? A strange word, is it not? We are indebted to the Americans for it, as we are for many other handy, but hardly elegant, additions to our vocabulary. Those who are fond of hunting for the origins of words, and who cannot live happily unless they find out how this is that, tell us that the sport—and fine fun it is—was first suggested to mankind by the beavers. They say that these busy-brained active animals, by way of keeping their blood-heat up in winter-time, go in a crowd to some snow-clad hill, scurry up to the top of it with their broad flat tails behind them, and go sliding down all in a row, rushing up again as soon as they find themselves at the bottom, and joining the other end of the procession, and that they keep “the pot arboiling” for hours with the highest glee imaginable. Well, perhaps the beavers do, but in one form or other the sport is as old, probably, as the days of Noah.
Canada is perhaps the home of tobogganing, for there the frost is severe and lasts long. Now, the scenery all round the “Sea of Dunallan,” for thus had the waters in which our heroes lay been named by them, was very wild indeed. The hills close beside the beach were high and rounded; beyond these they were higher still, many of them rising into peaks that seemed to have their homes among the stars.
It occurred to Paddy O’Connell, who seemed to be the inventive genius of the crew, and foremost wherever fun was to be had, that a species of tobogganing might be got up from which some “rale diversion” could be had.
So one fine moonlight night, with the stars all shining as well as they could, for the tails and ribbons of brilliant aurora that were hanging in the sky, Paddy went prospecting.