From subsequent experience I have learned that my stalking was rather wasted, as a bear will always come to the attack if you are alone. I liked his expression, what I saw of it, but either he did not like mine or he got an inkling that there was a covering party in the rear, for he suddenly seemed to think of something and turned and very sedately walked away to the left, with his head down. So I, also sedately, I hope, sat up on the soft snow and pulled at his shoulder at about fifty yards, and he collapsed, and then got up and pelted away to the right, the writer following, both of us tumbling and pulling ourselves up again in the soft snow and hummock. It took other two shots (375 cordite), both fairly well placed, to end its troubles.
The stalk and trying to sit up on the snow crust to draw a bead on the light primrose fur of the soft-looking beast, how vividly that will make all the delicate mother-of-pearl tints of the ice scene remain in my memory!
It is a wonder that animal painters, some of them quite distinguished, do not as a rule take the trouble to go and study their animals in their proper surroundings. What numbers of pictures we see of snow-leopards, bears, and such-like, done excellently up to a point, but with none of their natural atmosphere. The white bear with its pale primrose colour needs the shimmer and pearl-like tints of its natural surroundings, the blues and greens of the floe, veiled a little by fine snow or mist, and the hard ice, to set off its rounded soft furry form that hides such terrible strength. How could anyone, for example, hope to paint a caribou, with its glory of russet horns, unless he has seen its grey face and white neck amongst silver birch stems and the red glow of maples?
To do the ice-bear justice, you should first splash on to canvas the shimmer of mother-of-pearl, then inset the comic kicked-on-the-hind-quarter figure in yellow, give the humour and preserve his strength and majesty at the same time, so you’d have a masterpiece. At a school or zoological garden or museum you can learn anatomy and painting, but outside work is essential for the true animal painter. There he must forget bones and muscles and get the envelope of air and colour of the animal and its surroundings.
But to come back to our bear-hunting. As our party returned from the hunt, the men spread out left and right, covering about a mile, and so roped in a younger bear, which had been hanging about to leeward of the old male bear which Hamilton shot. Why it did so we cannot say. It was cheery work for the men, running about as beaters sometimes do at a drive when a hare gets up and tries to get back. It was a little shy of them, but did not seem to mind the ship; in fact it came right up to us and we got a boat down. It then tried to run down the floe edge and outflank beaters, but Larsen, a long, fair-haired, blue-eyed fellow, got ahead and fired bullets into ice in front of its nose—range about four yards, and it got disquieted and turned back to the ship, then slipped over the floe-edge into the sea, and we rowed after it, and a sailor made a dozen poor attempts to cast a lasso over its neck; he bungled it over somehow and we towed it, using dreadful language at us, alongside, and afterwards got it on board into a cage.
The Last Cartridge
A fighting Bear.