“O, it don’t much matter about him,” replied the Captain. “When we had looked after the hut, and had got the fire put out, and found leisure then to go after the bear, he was dead enough, as I said before; but much of the hair was singed off him as nicely almost, in some places, as if he had been shaved, so that the skin was of little use to us, and we only used the flesh, which we soon grew very fond of; for this bear, as I have said before, was a young one, and his flesh was tender.”
“What became of the other bear?” asked William, curious to reach the end of the bear story.
“We never saw anything more of him, nor heard anything more of him either,” answered the Captain; “and indeed we were never troubled any more with bears at all in that way, but thereafter lived in peace.
“That is to say, we lived in peace so far as the bears were concerned; but the cold and the darkness were now at their greatest, and the winds blew sometimes with such violence that we were often greatly terrified. Indeed, the storms at one time were so constant and so fearful that we could scarcely stir out of doors. Up to this period the weather had been mostly calm and very favorable to our course of life; but, as the winter began to turn towards the spring, all this was changed.
“Yet we could not but feel thankful for the great privilege of good weather with which Providence had so far blessed us. Had the storms raged in the autumn and early winter as they did now, we should have been quite unable to provide for our wants, and we must have starved. But now our needs were abundantly supplied, and we had little occasion for going abroad unless we wanted to and the weather was favorable. Once only did we experience any serious danger from the weather; and this, like most evils that befall all human beings, was due to our own imprudence.
“There being a bright moon, and the air being nearly calm and not unusually cold, we were tempted to take a long walk; and, attracted by one object after another that was upon the frozen sea over which we were walking,—here an iceberg of peculiar formation or remarkable size, there a snow-drift of singular form,—we found ourselves at last several miles away from our hut.
“When we turned about at length to retrace our steps, we discovered that the northern sky, which we now faced (for we had walked out in a southerly direction), showed stormy symptoms, and very quickly afterward a severe gale of wind broke over the island and the desolate sea, and we found ourselves overwhelmed with drifting snow.
“The sky was for the most part cloudless, and no snow fell from the heavens, but the light snow that lay upon the ice was picked up, as it were, by the wind, and whirled through the air in a manner as beautiful as it was terrible; for the drift coming in streams, with the rushing wind, lashed our faces, torturing us in a terrible manner, chilling us through and through, and almost overpowering us. Then an aurora borealis burst out before us, as if the heavens were on fire,—and from the top of our little island the snow came whirling above our heads in constant streams, that went circling about in a most fantastic way.
“You cannot imagine how grand this storm scene was,—the wind howling around us, the snowdrifts whirling about and spinning over the icy plain, the moon gleaming brightly upon the snow and the icebergs and the island, and every now and then a great blaze of many colors that were reflected on everything about us, would start up from the auroral arch, until the light became almost as great for a few moments as if it were broad day. It was very fearful, and you may be sure that we hastened on to the hut as fast as we could, though we were not in such a great hurry as to be wholly insensible to the magnificence of the scene.
“After we had reached the hut, the Dean repeated some verses which he had picked up somewhere; and when I recite them for you, you will see how appropriate they were to what I have been describing, and how strange seemed to us our situation when we found ourselves in the very place where the poet had imagined the Northwest wind to have a beginning.