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!
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration: THE LAST CARTRIDGE
A fighting Bear.
_From a Painting by the Author_]
I think this recapitulates our bearing for twenty-four hours rather
concisely. It does not quite convey the slight chill you feel at setting
out, on however beautiful and silvery a morning, at, say, five o’clock,
after being up all night, to wade across ice and snow to face the
horrible and dangerous Ursus Maritimus, or white monarch of the pole, and
it does not give the calm sense of conceit that you feel when you have
succeeded in slaughtering the same, and preserving your skin; it would be
bad form to express such sentiments loud out. The only sign our Spanish
friends showed was that they were a little sallow when they set out, and
a little warmer in colour on their return. A. C. H. quotes Neil Munro to
express his feeling. “Man,” he says, “am feeling shust sublime—could poo
the mast oot o’ the ship an’ peat a Brussels carpet.” No wonder, lucky
fellow, a one-thousand-and-twenty-pounder for his first polar bear. His
first black bear we thought mighty big a year or two ago, away back in
the barrens of Newfoundland; it weighed three hundred and eighty pounds.
Which is best to eat, polar or black bear, it is hard to say. I vote for
black bear pre salé and fed in the blueberry season. Still, the meat of
the polar bears here is extremely good and feels strengthening. One needs
strengthening. Yesterday was high summer, just touching freezing, but
still and a little sunny; to-night a gale from north-east and cold, and
ice driving gently round us.
But I am not complaining! No—I’ve been a summer and autumn in Antarctic
ice. After the bad days and black nights there in January and February,
nothing north of the Line need be considered as intolerable.
One note before winding up this day’s reckoning. If you wish to think
of the Arctic or Antarctic, you must think in colour somehow or
other. If you think in black and white you miss the idea, and form a
wrong impression all in black and white, just as I used to have from
engravings, and which it is very difficult to put aside. North Polar and
South Polar regions are essentially places of very high-toned delicate
colour, almost the only black is what you bring with you; mother-of-pearl
and birch-bark tints you have, and grimness there is in dead earnest,
dangers and minor discomforts, but it’s all in lovely colour in high note.
* * * * *
It is my watch and Gisbert’s to-night, but I am going to turn in after
writing this; two nights without sleep make one feel inclined to ride
out this gale behind a floe in one’s bunk—pipe, matches and book, and
practice chanter, all within arm’s-length, and jolly comfortable it is;
for, as Marcus Aurelius puts it: “If a man can live in a palace, he can
live there well.”
[Illustration]
I forgot to say we got our Bruin on board, after a terrible fight and
some blood lost, human and bear’s. We got a strop round his waist when
we had pulled him alongside with the lasso, and hauled him up in the air
by the steam-winch, the chain and hook fast in the strop. I think this
little drawing explains the method; it’s a most kindly and considerate
treatment. I mention this to ease the mind of some people who concluded
that a picture in this book of a bear hung by the head was a live bear
being lifted on board instead of being a bear that had been shot for an
attempt on our lives on the ice. Whalers and sealers and bear-hunters
I have found just as humane and gentle a people as those who stay at
home and often criticise them unkindly. We led the lasso under the floor
bars of a big wooden cage which we made to-day; three men hauled his
head down. Then we lowered him into the cage, and whilst he tried to
free his head, battens were rapidly nailed on over his back. So he is on
board, but not all right, it is quite possible he may pull away a batten
to-night. He is busy carpentering, and has already got one spar off. I
would prefer his going overboard to looking me up in my bunk.
It blew all night, so we all rested and had European breakfast at leisure
at nine. I did a picture of a bear I saw yesterday, Archie’s bear. It is
munching the head of a young hooded-seal, Cystophora Cristata, of which
we saw over forty in one lot yesterday. I also did a picture, from notes
at the time, of the jolly lonely bear playing with a piece of drift-wood,
lying on its back and tossing away the wood with his hind foot, just
before he got up, suspecting there was something in the wind, and before
going off over the floe down wind at that easy gait that leaves poor man
such miles behind whenever there is soft snow to negotiate.