"Good!" cried Tom. "We'll get a fine lot of tusks to send home."
"Steady on, steady on," warned his uncle, "walrus hunting is a very different matter from chasing seals. An old bull makes a formidable enemy."
"Are you coming along?" asked Tom, who saw that his uncle had his rifle.
"Yes, I wouldn't care to let you lads go on such an expedition alone. Seals, as I said, are too tame to afford real sport. Walrus hunting is another thing altogether."
While the steamer lay by, the adventurous little party clambered down into the boat. From the bridge, Mr. Chillingworth, who had elected to remain on board, waved a farewell to them and shouted his wishes for their good luck.
Tom and Jack took the oars and rowed with strong, swift strokes toward the drifting berg. As they neared it, it was seen that its sides were higher than they had looked from the steamer's decks. It was no easy task to make a landing. Finally, however, Mr. Dacre scaled a four-foot shelf and then pulled Tom up after him. Jack followed, and Sandy, who had not much fancied a closer view of the big-tusked, formidable-looking walruses, was not sorry to be told to stay behind and look after the boat, which there was no means of mooring to the smooth, slippery floe.
When the hunters gained the top of the berg, they saw that had they rowed around to the other side, a landing might have been effected much more easily. A depression ran like a small valley down to the water's edge, making an almost perfect landing place on the ice floe. Jack was ordered back to tell Sandy to row the boat around the floe to this point and await the hunters there.
In the meantime, Mr. Dacre and Tom had crept cautiously forward, crouching behind every projection that afforded cover, for at the approach of the boat the big walruses had flopped clumsily to the other side of the drifting berg.
As Jack made his way back from his errand to Sandy, he saw Mr. Dacre suddenly crouch low, and Tom, who was at his side, did the same. The boy suspected that the game had been sighted and was within range. He made his way cautiously to the hunters' sides, and was rewarded with the sight of about a dozen huge black masses lying along the outer edge of a ridge of ice that ran into the "valley" before mentioned.
Mr. Dacre put a warning hand on Jack's arm to prevent his making any outcry. He pointed to the highest point of the ice valley. There, with his great, clumsy head erect, his hairy nostrils distended and his long tusks gleaming white against his fat, shiny body, was a huge bull walrus. The sentinel, perhaps the leader of the herd of formidable-looking creatures.