We were at breakfast and would have liked time for a pipe before the news came: “An ice-bear!” and over the bows on to the floe by the rope ladder five of us scrambled. The writer was armed with a heavy double 475, and cartridges the size of asparagus, said to be unnecessarily heavy, but Hamilton’s last monster bear took five of his 355 magnum, all in pretty good places. It seems to me that a really big bear would be more surely killed by a heavy 475 or 500.[16] Bad luck it was to have to travel with a cut foot, and doubly bad at the very start to make a false step and go head first into a hole in the floe, and to get wet through, with waders full at the start. However, Archie cleverly caught the rifle and gave me a hand out, and I got rid of some of the water in the way all anglers are familiar with—that is, lying on your back and holding up your feet, a few “tut tuts,” and we proceeded over hard snow, when we could get it, wading blue shallows from time to time. Two of our seamen went flanking about a mile out on to the floe and we beat up half-a-mile from sea-edge, aiming at the place where we had seen the bears from the crow’s nest, a female with two cubs. The chill of the early start, cold water and the soreness of the foot wore off as we slowly covered mile after mile; sometimes walking was merely a struggle, soft snow covering blocks of ice with horrid pitfalls, other times over crisp, glittering, sunlit beds of icicles set in blue, level as a mat, tumbling into glittering fragments as we crunched across. But our trail was all in vain; from blocks and hummocks we spied the plains and could not find our bears. They had made a wide circuit, gone down wind, and got ours, I expect, and had gone clean away, and as the floe was, say, twenty miles across and all over hummocks, they were soon lost to sight, even from the mast-head.
Coming back at leisure we had more time to enjoy the warm sun and the colouring. There were three distinct blues. Behind our little white ship at the floe-edge the sea glittered deep blue, like Oxford blue; on the floe between us and the ship there was spread a wide pond of shallow water, lighter than Cambridge blue, and the pigeon-grey sky showed patches of light peacock-blue.
A change of clothes, a redressed foot by Captain Svendsen—one of the lightest handed surgeons I have met—and some bear-steak and we started steaming round the floe, pretty sure of getting our glasses on to the bears before many hours were past. For hours we watched with glasses and telescope from the bridge and crow’s nest the passing white and grey plains and snowy fantastic rock scenes till we almost slept with the continual concentration of the eye on the moving white scene. But alas, at five P.M., the mist came down again, so again we put our ship’s nose against the ice-floe and we pray now that the mist may lift. The skipper and Gisbert took advantage of this pause to make an Artificial horizon with tar in a plate, and tried to find our position by same with sun on the tar surface. But the tar congealed off the level, and after calculations in decimals, yards in length, we find our position is two hundred miles inside the north-east coast of Greenland!
Before midnight, with the sun still high above the horizon, the mist lifted and again we go plodding round another huge floe. We cannot get west yet, enormous floes bar our way, there is a narrow passage, say two hundred yards wide, to west between two counties of ice, but it is too narrow for us to venture through. Should the floes close we would be imprisoned before we had time to retreat.
It is almost incredible, there is a feeling of movement to-day, the 17th July, quite a perceptible sense of pitch and roll. You notice it even without looking. The living movement of the sea—for ten days we have been “in the ice,” with smooth water. How welcome is this open water. A clear road lies before us to Greenland—why should the ice this year lie across our track in such fields, making us take fifteen days for a distance we expected to cover in four? Perhaps it was as well we met it; though there were no whales there were at least bears, so we have their valuable skins and seal blubber, and our two live bears to make up our cargo. They bring rather an unpleasing aroma at times into the pure Arctic air. Their cages are in parts becoming more and more thick, with stumps of the two-inch battens, which they have eaten their way through. We begin to wonder how to get one of them across from Trömso to Edinburgh, for it would be awkward if they eat their way through on a passenger steamer. Mem: Keep on practising lasso and throwing hitches and pistol practice.
At three this morning, twenty minutes to three to be exact, and in Don José’s watch, we spotted a bear on the great floe we were hanging about yesterday; a bear and two cubs, probably the bear of yesterday, and he and Gisbert went off armed cap-à-pie, and the writer could not but be amused at the old lady’s cleverness, though it was at the expense of our companions. It was a mile away, but with a fine glass every movement could be followed, and with no glass to aid its sight it could apparently follow our movements. It stood up its full height, craned its neck to one side or the other, then got on all-fours and spoke to its cubs, and they set off up wind, then it turned round, took another spy at our friends, who soon looked like little black dots amongst the waste of floe, ice hummocks and pinnacles, little lakes and shallow valleys, and as they pursued their way steadily to where the bears had been seen, it made a wide sweep to their left and got away farther even than we could follow it from the mast. I made a jotting from the telescope as per over page, which gives an idea of the kind of going.
A Polar Bear