When men have no knowledge whatsoever of the danger they run, they are
liable to do the most foolhardy thing imaginable and come out of it
safely—to the utter astonishment of all old timers.
Here is a striking example of that, which happened a few years ago:
We were forging ahead through the ice of Hudson Straits on an auxiliary
schooner. There were on board a lot of “Husky” dogs which we were
transferring from one trading station to another.
One morning the man in the crow’s nest saw a small herd of walrus asleep
on the ice. Creeping up slowly, we got up to a hundred yards from them
before they took any notice of the ship.
[Illustration: Man in crow’s nest]
The meat was needed for the dogs. Firing a volley, we killed two of the
huge animals outright. The rest of the herd dived and scattered.
Manoeuvring alongside the pan, we put one man of the crew overboard to
rope the carcasses to be hoisted on deck with the winch.
It happened that the sailor who went over the side was an Italian who
had never been in the North. He was very keen and excited. While he was
busy tying a rope round each animal’s head under the tusks, a big bull
walrus, which had probably been wounded in the body a few minutes
before, suddenly came up to the surface beside the pan. With one heave,
the enormous animal jumped clean out of the water to the ice a few feet
from the sailor whose back was turned. Everyone on board was terrified.
Nobody dared to shoot for fear of hitting the man.
The walrus shook his head and seemed ready to plunge his tusks right in
the middle of the man’s back. He weighed over fifteen hundred pounds.
Feeling the animal’s breath on him, the Italian turned round. “Get out
of here, you ugly thing!” he shouted in his own language, and with that
he slapped him right across the jaw with the back of his hand. The
walrus gave a grunt, slid backwards over the edge of the pan and
vanished in the depths of the sea.
The sailor calmly turned back to his job, while on board we breathed a
prayer of thankfulness.