The colonel stared incredulously at his companion, and then, dropping the rifle, took and applied to his eye the telescope which Sir Reginald handed to him.
“By George, you are right!” he exclaimed. “What a very extraordinary thing. Why,” he continued, “it is not a seal at all, it is a man, an Esquimaux. Now, look out and you will see some sport; the fellow is fitting an arrow to his string, and how cautiously he is doing it, too. It is my belief that he has got himself up as a seal and has been simulating the actions of the animal in order to entice that deluded bear within range. There! he has shot his arrow and hit the mark, but the bear does not seem to be very much the worse. Aha! now you have to run for it, my good fellow. By Jove, the matter grows exciting!”
The Esquimaux had indeed been compelled to “run for it,” the only apparent effect of the arrow being to irritate the bear. The man ran fairly well, although hampered with an immense amount of clothing, but the bear proved the faster of the two. He rapidly gained upon the man, and seemed about to spring upon him when the party in the pilot-house poured in a general fusillade from their rifles. There was just a perceptible click from the locks of the weapons, but neither fire nor smoke appeared, neither was there any report. At that moment the bear rose upon his hind-legs and, reaching forward with his fore-paws, aimed a terrific blow at the flying hunter. The man, who had been intently watching his enemy all the while, nimbly leaped aside, and, quick as thought, plunged a light lance fairly under the creature’s armpit and deep into his body. The bear uttered a single roar of pain and baffled rage, staggered a moment, and fell upon the ice, dead.
“Bravo! very cleverly done, indeed,” exclaimed the colonel, apostrophising the distant Esquimaux; “that was a lucky stroke for you, my man. But, I say, professor, what in the world is the matter with these wretched rifles? Every one of them missed fire, and, so far as we are concerned, that unfortunate Esquimaux might have been killed.”
“He might—yes, that is quite true,” answered the professor with provoking composure; “but if he had been it would have been our fault, not that of the rifles; it was we who missed, not they. Every one of them duly discharged its bullet, and we simply missed our mark. But had we—or rather had I—preserved my presence of mind, I could still have saved the man, for each of these weapons is a magazine rifle, firing twenty shots—a fact which I had forgotten for the moment, and which it now seems I have never yet explained to you. Fortunately, the poor man has proved quite able to take care of himself; but the shameful way in which we all missed the bear, and our failure to fire again, is a lesson on the folly of using untried weapons in an emergency. We must practise, gentlemen; we must practise.”
And, without troubling themselves further as to what became of the Esquimaux and his game, the deeply mortified party set themselves forthwith first to listen to the professor’s explanation of the peculiarities of the weapons, and next, to practise diligently with them for a full hour; at the expiration of which, as the rifles were really a splendid arm and simple enough to handle when their action had been clearly explained, the quartette had fully regained their confidence in themselves and each other, having done some most excellent shooting.
Meanwhile the channel hourly grew more narrow and intricate; and, to add still further to the difficulties of the passage, the wind shifted round and began to blow freshly from the northward, bringing with it a dense and bitterly cold fog. The travellers struggled gallantly against these adverse circumstances as long as any progress northward was at all possible, being desirous of realising, as fully as might be, for themselves the difficulties experienced by explorers in these high latitudes; but at length they found themselves so completely hemmed in by vast floes and drifting masses of pack-ice that to prolong the struggle would only be endangering the ship, and they were reluctantly compelled to own themselves beaten and to rise into the air.
They rose to a height of five hundred feet above the sea-level, and, at this elevation, found themselves entirely free of the fog. So far this was well, but the dense masses of heavy grey snow-laden cloud which obscured the heavens above them, and the threatening aspect of the sky to windward, told them that their holiday weather was, at all events for the present, gone, and that they were about to experience the terrors of a polar gale. The temperature fell with astounding rapidity; and they were compelled to beat a rapid retreat to their state-rooms, there to don additional garments. This done, they sallied out on deck, to find that during the short period of their retirement a heavy snow-storm had set in, the air being so full of the great white blinding flakes that, standing abreast the pilot-house, it was impossible to see either end of the ship. Floating in the air as they were it was, of course, impossible for them to estimate the strength of the gale, the only apparent movement of the atmosphere being that due to their own passage through it. Though heading to the northward, with the engines making a sufficient number of revolutions per minute to propel them through still air at the rate of thirty miles per hour, it was quite on the cards that the adverse wind might be travelling at a higher speed than this, in which event they would actually be driving more or less rapidly astern, notwithstanding their apparent forward motion. It thus became necessary to post a look-out at each end of the ship, in order to avoid all possibility of collision with some towering iceberg, unless they chose to rise high enough in the air to be clear of all danger; and this they were reluctant to do, as they wished to experience, for at least once in their lives, all the terrors of a polar gale. The baronet accordingly volunteered to look out forward and the colonel to do the same aft, and they hastened at once to their respective stations, Mildmay and the professor superintending meanwhile the engine levers and other appliances controlling the motion of the ship. It was well for them that these precautions were so promptly taken, for the colonel had scarcely reached his post when, through the thick whirling snow which scurried past him, he descried a huge white ghostly mass looming vaguely up in the semi-darkness directly astern, and before he well had time to make up his mind that he actually saw something, the top of a gigantic berg revealed itself close at hand, and his prompt warning cry was only raised in barely sufficient time to prevent the Flying Fish driving stern foremost into it, when the loss of her propeller must inevitably have resulted. Mildmay, however, whose quick ear first caught the sound, promptly sent the engines at full speed ahead, and the danger was averted.
Meanwhile, though the snow whirled so thickly around them and the fog was so dense beneath that they were unable to see anything, they were not allowed to remain entirely in ignorance of what was happening in their near proximity. The howling of the bitter blast over the frozen waste beneath resounded in their ears like the diapason of some huge organ played by giant fingers, and mingled with these deeper tones there rose up to them a constant grinding crunching sound with occasional rifle-like reports, telling of the tremendous destruction going on among the ice-floes beneath.
Suddenly the snow ceased, the fog was swept away upon the wings of the gale, and the entire scene in all its terrific grandeur burst at once upon their gaze. They were hovering immediately over the spot where two immense floes had come into collision, and for miles to the right and left of them the contiguous margins were being ground to pieces by the enormous pressure, and the splintered fragments heaped up one above another in the wildest confusion, to a height of from fifty to eighty feet above the surface of the floe. The ice, which was about fifteen feet thick, crumbled away like fragile glass, and it was only by observing the manner in which masses weighing hundreds of tons were wildly tossed hither and thither like corks that even an approximate idea of the tremendous power at work could be obtained.