"I cannot tell," replied my comrade, as he toiled on, supporting himself with his ice-gaff; "I never heard it before, and don't like it at all, sir. I wish we were on board," he added, shuddering alike with cold and superstitious fear, as the sound came again and again from among the hummocks, and it was as weird and mournful to the ear as their aspect was to the eye.
It was a strange mooing, and gradually swelled into a bellowing as we proceeded; thus it evidently came from the throat of a large animal—but what species of animal could it be in such a place?
We were not left long in doubt, for on the centre of a narrow isthmus of ice, over which lay our way to the ship, as the fissure beyond it opened wider than elsewhere, sat a huge, dark monster of the deep, in which, on approaching it, I recognised (from pictures I had seen) a sea-horse, or walrus, which the reader must remember is not a seal, but a ferocious animal that can defend itself and frequently destroys its assailants, and this one manifested not the slightest intention of making way for us.
He was fearfully pre-Adamite, or antediluvian, in his proportions, being fully twenty feet in length, and having a pair of tusks thirty inches long protruding from the mass of quill-like bristles which covered (like a thick moustache and whiskers) his upper lips and cheeks. Grimly and ferociously he regarded us with his deep-set eyes, which glittered in the moonlight amid the square mass of his elephantine visage, and on beholding us, his hollow mooing turned into a species of grunting bark.
Finding that he obstinately barred our way, and, moreover, seemed inclined to attack us, I levelled my rifle full at his grizzly front and fired, while Ridly rashly and fatally charged him in the smoke with his ice-gaff, which was armed with a sharp pike.
My ball had pierced his great sloping shoulder, pricking him as a pin might have done, and serving only to incense him, for his bark changed to a mighty roar, and when the smoke cleared away, I saw poor Ridly, who had fallen, lying under one of his gigantic fore-flippers. The foam of rage was frothing on the bristles of the sea-horse, and with his two enormous tusks, which stood upward through them like two crooked sabre-blades, he was alternately rending the limbs and body of his assailant and then great fragments of ice, which he dashed into the water on each side of him.
Ridly had only power to utter a faint cry, when he expired.
Appalled by this sudden and terrible catastrophe, I reloaded my rifle, and full of mingled rage and fear—a combination which made me no longer feel the intensity of the cold—I fired again and again at the horrid front of the walrus; but every shot seemed only to redouble his wrath, and he continued to rend to pieces the clothes and body of Ridly, till in less than five minutes the ice around him was covered by the blood of his victim and that which gushed from his own wounds. Ridly's left leg he wrenched completely off, and cast into the sea.
Rolling about in his wrath, and in his lubberly efforts to reach me, he at last fell into the water; I then rushed across the narrow isthmus where my poor companion lay. As I did so, the walrus made many ineffectual efforts to reach me, grasping the ice with his forepaws, or dashing his vast shoulders madly against it, while he plunged and bellowed and covered all the water in the chasm around him with mingled blood and foam, and, in his impotent fury, tore great blocks off the ice by the tusks of his lower jaw.
I fired ten shots into his body, point blank, without his strength or wrath appearing to diminish in the least.