CHAPTER XXV
I continue these bear-shooting notes this evening, Friday, 11th July. I know it is evening from a faint blush of pink on the snow that is just perceptible; without this I would have lost all idea of time, for since yesterday it has been all bear-hunting and no sleep. Now we have a bear alongside, all alive-o! He is tied with a rope and is swimming just like a man, hard astern, trying to tow our little whaler from the floe-edge; and he roars every now and then in angry disgust, and then turns up his hind quarters and dives and swims a few strokes under water, only to be pulled up again on the rope or lasso. He can swim apparently without fatigue for many hours, occasionally taking a dive as deep as the lasso will allow him. We hope to get him to our Edinburgh Zoological Park, where he will be much appreciated, especially by myself and other artists and children and seniors.
He is the last of six bears in twenty-four busy hours. Don Luis Velasquez and Don José Herrero each got their first bears, one after the other, but unfortunately both were in the water. Don José’s, the last, led us a very far chase over miles of floe and ice-covered sea.
The most fascinating part of the day was watching the bear’s abandon of movement and joy as it did its evening saunter over the floes, utterly oblivious of our presence and probably full of young seal fat and joy; when it came across the stem of a drifted pine—it was as good as a circus. How it joked with the pine log, on its back on the snow, played the guitar with it, caressed it, then spumed it in disdain with its great soft hind foot, only to take it up in its teeth again to wave it slowly about. In the middle of this solitary play, however, the bear’s seventh sense told it there was something impending and he left his cherished stick and paddled off leisurely down wind and floe—then he got the wind of the guns and went off pretty fast for a mile or so, occasionally stopping to sniff the breeze. At his easy rate of motion he quickly left Don José and his contingent behind—little black spots in the world of white plains and hummocks. Did the reader ever see a bear fairly out for a walk, and notice the extraordinary resemblance there is between the movements of a bear in the open and those of a ferret—shorten the ferret’s body and its tail and you have something very like a microscopic bear, the long back, the way they each wave their snouts and stand up on their hind-quarters to sniff the breeze—beyond doubt, it is funny. I do not think it is really undignified, but when someone says that its movements suggest its having received a violent kick on its hind-quarters, you cannot get the idea out of your mind; and whatever its sex, or however big and powerful he may be, you must smile at the way he carries his tail down. Is their strength not marvellous? A large fellow here was waiting for a seal at a hole in the ice, and a blue seal (Phoca Barbata) just showed itself, and apparently to take the chance, with one swoop of his forearm and claws, the bear threw the great six-hundred-pound seal well on to the ice, and with a forefoot on its back, broke the head off at one bite and drank the blood and wolfed up every bit of skin and blubber; for the meat or cran, and bones, the bear, like the human, has no use, unless he is hard pressed.
Of course it is a big old bear which can do such a feat, possibly twenty years old and much bigger and broader in the quarter and shoulder than you can expect to find in Europe in confinement. Archie Hamilton got such a veteran this morning, quite comfortably, after twelve-o’clock breakfast. With De Gisbert and some men they sallied forth over the floe we were up against to deprive two bears thereon of their skins and lives—that is, if the bears did not in the first instance deprive them of theirs.
It was fascinating watching the little figures growing smaller and smaller in the distance, and to watch the soft, pale yellow heap that represented the ice-bear. I have a splendid glass, and at half-a-mile can distinguish the gloriously luxurious rolls and movements of the great fellow and note the black nose and black soles of his feet as he stretches himself, and scrapes a bed in the snow for his midday siesta.
With the glass I see Archie get into soft snow and stoop and point the rifle and get up, and I wonder why, when he does this again, and I swing my glass on to the bear and notice a flush come over its yellow back, and there is a spout of red from its side; though I see so clearly I hear no sound of the shot. Five times Archie hit his Majesty, all in more or less deadly places, but he came on and girned at them and wanted to chaw them up, a fighting bear. Five 350 magnum bullets shattering bone and muscle actually knocking over the big beast, yet not destroying its fight, gives an idea of the muscle of such a full-grown snowy chief. He measured, as he lay, eight feet two inches—that is, from nose to tail; standing up on his bare feet, he would have stood ten and a half feet and his estimated weight was one thousand and twenty pounds. As our estimate was founded on steelyard weights of many other bears and their measurements, this may be accepted as correct.
Personally, a foot or a point or two about a beast, or a ton or two’s weight in a whale does not matter to me very much, it is the fun of the stalk that counts—be it for a rabbit, bear, or fingerling trout, the dew on the clover or the icicles on the berg—and how you get your beast, and what you see on the way to it, for things get impressed on memory by the excitement of a stalk, in a way they would never be at other times. If you have to crawl, for example, through a shallow blue pool on a snow-field in the early morning, as was my experience to-day, to get within shot of a bear that suspects you, you note the queer blue tint of the pool that soaks through your waistcoat—that it is sometimes blue, and sometimes purple, depending on the angle at which the light strikes the ice crystals under or on its surface. And there is plenty of time to speculate why you do not see such pools on the floes in the Antarctic.
From the ship when we spotted the bear alluded to above, and until it was killed, in fact, we thought it was very large, but it turned out to be not half the size of the big fellow C. A. H. has secured.
He and De Gisbert and I set out after it together. But the only way, I thought at the time, to get within shot without scaring it was to do a regular deer-stalk crawl of a hundred yards to get behind an isolated piece of rounded snow, just big enough to cover one person. So I left Gisbert and Hamilton behind a bigger hummock as covering party and proceeded at great leisure, ventre à terre, to approach the said piece of snow, I do not think that ursus got my wind, but possibly the noise of my elbow crunching through a hard crust of the snow drew his attention, and I saw a black eye and the dark ear of the right side of his face peering round the little lump of snow, then his black left eye looked round the other side of the hummock, and then both eyes and black nose were gently raised over the top—we were stalking each other!