“This failure greatly discouraged me, but still I was not so much cast down as you might think. Perhaps it was because I had eaten so many eggs, and was no longer hungry; for, let me tell you, when one’s stomach gets empty, the courage has pretty much all gone out of him.
“Besides this, I had made some discoveries which seemed in some way to forebode good, though I could not exactly say why. I found the birds thicker and thicker as I proceeded. Their nests were in some places so close together that I could hardly walk without treading on their eggs. I also saw several foxes, some of which were white and others were dark gray. As I walked on, they scampered away over the stones ahead of me, and then perched themselves on a tall rock near by, apparently very much astonished to see me. They seemed to look upon me as an intruder, and I thought they would ask, ‘What business have you coming here?’ They had little idea how glad I should have been to be almost anywhere else,—on the farm from which I had run away, for instance,—and leave them in undisputed possession of their miserable island. They seemed to be very sleek and well-contented foxes; for they were gorging themselves with raw eggs, just as I had been doing, and they were evidently the terror of the birds. I saw one who had managed in some way to capture a duck nearly as large as himself, and was bouncing up the hill—to his den, no doubt—with the poor thing’s neck in his mouth, and its body across his shoulder.
“Then, too, I discovered, from the east side of the island, where the ice was solid, a great number of seals lying in the sun, as if asleep, on the ice; and when I came around on the west side, where the sea was open, great schools of walruses, with their long tusks and ugly heads, were sporting about in the water as if at play, and an equally large number of the narwhal, with their long horns, were also playing there. Only that they are larger, and have these hideous-looking tusks, walruses are much like seals. The narwhal is a small species of whale, being about twenty feet long, and spotted something like an iron-gray horse. Its great peculiarity is the horn, which grows, like that of a sword-fish, straight out of the nose, and is nearly half as long as the body. Like all the other whales, it must come up to the surface of the water to breathe; and its breathing is done through a hole in the top of the head, like any other whale’s. You know the breathing of a whale is called ‘spouting,’ or ‘blowing,’—that is, when he breathes out it is so called, and when he does this he makes the spray fly up into the air.
“This breathing of the largest whales can be seen several miles; that is, I should say, the spray thrown up by their breath. So you see the common expression of the whale-fishers, ‘There she blows!’ is a very good one; for sometimes, when the whale is very large, the spray looks like a small waterspout in the sea.
“Besides the narwhal, which I have told you about, I saw another kind of whale, even smaller still. This is called the white whale, though it isn’t exactly white, but a sort of cream-color. They had no horns, however, like the narwhal; and they skimmed along through the water in great numbers, and very close together, and when they come to the surface they breathe so quickly that the noise they make is like a sharp hiss.
John Hardy making Discoveries.
“Considering the numbers of these animals,—the seals and walruses and narwhals and white whales,—I was not surprised, when I went close down to the beach, to find a great quantity of their bones there, evidently of animals that had died in the sea and been washed ashore. Indeed, as I went along a little farther, and had reached nearly to the place where I had left the Dean, I found the whole carcass of a narwhal lying among the rocks, where it had been thrown by the waves, and very near it I discovered also a dead seal. About these there were several foxes, which went scampering away as soon as they saw me. They had evidently come there to get their dinner; for they had torn a great hole in the side of the dead narwhal, and two of them had begun on the seal. I thought if I could get some of the skins of these pretty foxes, they would be nice warm things to wrap the Dean’s hands and feet in, so I began flinging stones at them as hard as I could; but the cunning beasts dodged every one of them, and, running away up the hillside, chattered in such a lively manner that it seemed as if they were laughing at me, which provoked me so much that I went on vowing to get the better of them in one way or another.
“All this time, you must remember, I had left the poor Dean by himself, and you may be sure I was very anxious to get back to him; but before I tell you anything more about him, I must stop a minute longer to describe more particularly this island on which I had been cast away. You must understand there were no trees on it at all; and, indeed, there were scarcely any signs of vegetation whatever. On the south side, where we landed after the wreck, the hillside was covered for a short distance with thick grass, and above this green slope there were great tall cliffs like the palisades of the Hudson River,—which you must all see some time; but all the rest of the way around the island I saw scarcely anything but rough rocks, very sharp and hard to walk over. In some places, however, where the streams of melted snow had spread out in the level places, patches of moss had grown, making a sort of marsh. Here I discovered some flowers in full bloom, and among them were the buttercup and dandelion, just like what we find in the meadows here, only not a quarter so large; but my head was too much filled with more serious thoughts at that time to care about flowers.