On the smooth floe we held various sports, tossing the caber, for example, the caber being the remains of the pine-tree we found on a floe as we came north. Also we had fencing. As there was rather a pretty small blue iceberg alongside, C. A. H. got his camera and photographed the two champions. The too-strong she-cook went a walk with Chee Chee; a little trot, rather; she must weigh about two hundred pounds, but she rather trips than walks. I wonder what a bear will think of her if he meets her. She is broad and deep-chested, with round red cheeks, and has a gentle voice and a gurgling laugh any time in the twenty-four hours of daylight. There was also a little pipe-playing, so the smooth floe with the blue pool was quite lively, till the call came to bear arms! Then everyone but Chee Chee came on board, and it stood alone, with all hands saying endearing things to make it come on board. Whether it was my seizing the lasso, the sight of which it hates, or one of the men circumventing it, I would not like to say, but from one reason or the other it came with a sudden bolt—I think the lasso did it!
I nearly forgot to put our Spanish friends into the picture; here they are, there is just room, right-hand top corner, hilariously shooting skuas, those robber birds. The señors are jolly the clock round; what a fallacy that is, about “solemn as a Spanish Don.”
CHAPTER XXXIV
There being still mist this morning our budget of news can only be described as strictly Local, for we can only see over a few yards of floe and rippling sea. Three hooded-seals appeared astern just now, as I went out for a breath after completing the aforesaid masterpiece of the floe-edge scene. They went off with a splash, as if alarmed at finding themselves near us, and then they came up again and took stock of us at about two hundred yards. We could not see them well, so we did not shoot. What we may call Home news, is of our cubs forward. William the (comparatively) Silent worked through his floor, and it had to be renewed. We call his sister Christabel, for she bit her brother’s face without any reason; but it is rather unfair calling her so, for he certainly threatened her—thought she caused all the troubles he had had in his short life. She refuses to have water. Even when we pull out her water-trough she violently draws it in again and upsets the water. She has strength! I think she will be a great catch in a zoo, where her pretty ways could be studied behind bars with safety. The old Starboard bear is now mastering the material iron; teeth, he has learned, are no use, so he is applying brain. He eats sugar from our fingers, and would eat hand and arm with half a chance. I begin to sympathise with him in regard to confined quarters; even the wide space we have of about three square yards of deck, in which to have our exercise, feels confined after about five weeks’ time.
I forget what we did or did not do in the morning of Sunday, 3rd August. I expect, the same as usual. There is thin mist, with sun shining through, an unhealthy mouldy morning, and we have a feeling as if we had had bad champagne the night before—a slight nasal catarrh, and a little sneezing going on amongst your neighbours and several complaints of rheumatism, cuts, and boils.
I have always heard the Arctic likened to atmospheric champagne, where men’s spirits are said to be high and colds exist not. Well, all I can say is that in this particular vessel in these latitudes (there again, there’s someone else sneezing) there are many such complaints, and smells! Hamilton says “The look of the sea suggests a smell.” It suggests to me London on a November morning. Sea and air are so stagnant and cold, you could lean against the icy smell of our bears or kitchen, and a cigar whiff almost strikes you.
When the sun got up we steered away east and south—a hundred and forty miles we have yet to go, to get out of ice into the open sea, “the rough highway to freedom and to peace,” as Morris puts in his Jason, and all day we passed down lanes and lakes and across belts of deadly still water between floes of flat ice, with few and small hummocks. And seals became plentiful. As far as the eye could reach, occasional black marks could be seen on the floe and little black bullet-heads appeared in calm water at the floe-edge, and some of them came and examined us from thirty or forty yards as we passed, for an instant, and dashed under water again, leaving a swirl like the rise of a ten-pound trout.