The air was clear enough when I left the bark, and though the [v]mercury was out of use and coiled up snugly in the bulb, it wasn’t as cold as you might think, for just then there was no wind. It’s a breeze up in the Arctic that makes you feel the chill. There was no sun, of course; there never is sun up there in that dreary winter: but the stars were burning blue and clear, and every now and then a big [v]catherine wheel of [v]aurora would show off, for all the world like a firework exhibition.
My! but it was lonely, though, once you had left the ship behind! There was just the scrunching of your feet on the frost [v]rime, and not another sound in the world. Even the ice was frozen too hard to squeak. And overhead in that purple-black Heaven you never knew Who was looking down at you. Out there in that cold, bare, black, icy silence, I had occasion to remember that Neil Angus McTodd had been a sinner in his time, and it made me shiver when I glanced up toward those blue, cold stars and the deep purple darkness that lay between and behind them.
It may be that I was thinking less of my hunting than was advisable, for of a sudden I woke up to the sound of heavy feet padding over the crisp frost rime. I turned me round sharply enough, but as far as the dim light carried there was nothing alive to be seen through the gloom. As soon as I stopped, the footsteps stopped, too, and I don’t mind admitting that my scalp tickled.
However, when I’d hauled up the hammer of the Henry, and it dropped into position with a good, wholesome cluck, my nervousness very soon filtered out. There’s a comfort about a heavy-bore rifle like a Henry—which is the kind always used by whalers and sealers—that you can’t get from those fancy little guns. And then, as it seemed that the animal, whatever it might be, wasn’t going to move till I did, I shuffled my high sealskin boots on the crisp snow to make believe that I was tramping again.
The creature started after me promptly. It was hard to tell the direction, because every sound in that icy silence was echoed by a thousand bergs and hummocks of ice; but presently from behind a small splintered ridge of the floe there strolled out what seemed to me the largest bear in the Arctic regions. You must know that the night air there has a [v]deceptive light—it enlarges things—and the beast appeared to me as standing some five feet six inches high at the shoulder, and measuring some twenty feet from nose to tail.
There was myself and there was the bear in the dark middle of that awful loneliness, with no one to interfere; and as there was only one of us to get home, I preferred it should not be he. So I took a brace on myself, and stood with the Henry ready to fire.
There was nothing you might call [v]diffidence about that bear. He slouched along up to me at a steady walk, with the hair and skin on him swinging about as though it was too large for his carcass and he was wearing a misfit. He seemed to look upon me as dinner, and no hurry needful. There was a sort of calm certainty about him that made me angry.
I was not what you might call a marksman in those days, and so I set a bit of [v]hummock about ten yards off as a limit where I could not very conveniently miss, and waited until the bear should come opposite that. Well, he came to it right enough in his own time. There was, as I have said before, no diffidence about the creature. And then I raised the Henry and fired her off.
Cluck went the hammer on the nipple, but there was no bang.
My! it was a misfire, and there was the bear coming down on me as steady and unconcerned as a [v]traction engine! I clawed out that cartridge and crammed in another. The bitter cold of the metal skinned my fingers like escaping steam. Then I cocked the gun again, shouldered it, and pulled trigger again.