CHAPTER VIII 

ROYAL SPORT WITH POLAR BEARS 

     We had much work and hardship but not a little sport during our year up there near the Pole. Take it all in all, I think we had more fun out of polar bears than anything else. Fortyseven, all together, fell before our rifles, and the amount of sport involved in all this slaughter would almost make a book of itself. The day the sun disappeared for a little matter of eighteen weeks—October 19th—I find this record in my journal: 

     "The loss of the sun to-day was compensated for by a most extraordinary bear-hunt. Dr. Nansen said his Siberian dogs would not attack bears. We wish Dr. Nansen could have been with us today to see our pack of twenty loose dogs pursue and attack the big white fellow who came shuffling leisurely over the hill. As usual, Ursus, our black bear dog, was the first to ap­proach the enemy. Bruin simply looked at him in a half-conscious, half-indifferent sort of way, as much as to say:

'You're the biggest fox I've seen in Franz Josef Land, but I'm not afraid of you.'

     "Then he proceeded in dignified fashion on his way, turning neither to the right nor to the left, and hastening not his gait—a line of conduct altogether becoming to one of the lords of the isles. But when Ursus was reenforced by half a dozen, and then a dozen and a half of his comrades, and the whole pack gathered round the bear, yelping and dancing and showing their teeth, but never quite getting hold of him, the bear concluded that, after all, he might have a serious job on his hands. 

     "But he made a fatal mistake in his tactics. If he had simply run away, as fast and as far as his great legs could have carried him, he would have been quite safe, for dogs alone cannot kill a full-grown bear, even if the odds are fifty to one. Instead, he showed fight at once, and tried to reach the tormentor nearest him. First, a savage lunge this way, now the other, the frothing mouth wide open, displaying tusks which needed only one chance to plant death in the vitals of the toughest dog that ever stood on four legs. But the pesky beasts were always just out of his reach. A dog can run faster than a bear, and move about more agilely, and that is the sum total of his superiority. At each onslaught the bear made a break in the circle about him, as the dogs had no wish to come in contact with those terrible incisors; but a fire in the rear always caused him to wheel round, and thus the circle closed up again.

     "The wardance continued till the poor bear was beside himself with rage and fatigue. Now the swirling, yelping mass had reached the base of the sharp incline that led up to the basalt mountain peak. Up the steep, icy surface the bear now attempted to escape his pursuers. With prodigious strength he crept rapidly upward, but the dogs were constantly at his side. They were in front of him, behind him, all around him; and though some of them lost their footing and slipped to the bottom of the glacier, others took their places and the luckless brute found no peace. 

     "Suddenly the bear's huge paws slipped their grip, and down he came—a veritable avalanche of flesh and fur that roared as it rolled. Fully 250 feet he slid, most of the way at an angle of fortyfive degrees, and by the time he struck the nearly level plateau he had an impetus which carried him rolling, bounding, ricochetting among the rocks, ploughing through the snow fully a hundred feet farther. His course lay directly over the spot where we stood waiting for him, and we politely and rather hastily stood aside to give him right of way. Some of the dogs had been carried down with the rush, and the others were too eager to wait to run down, and so did a bit of tobogganing on their own account. Before the bear could get upon his feet the dogs were all about him once more. We were there too, and a few 'Winchester 45.90s brought this most sensational bearhunt to an end."

     A rather pathetic bear-hunt was one we had a few days later. Mother and cub came ambling along the plateau side by side, and of course the dogs soon had the pair surrounded. 'When we arrived upon the scene, after a sharp run of a mile, the battle was in full course, with the dogs getting decidedly the best of it. The poor dam had been harried almost into a state of exhaustion. Still, she kept up the desperate struggle, and never once permitted her young hopeful to get five feet from her side. After each lunge at the nearest dog, she quickly returned to her baby, and this fat graceful little fellow did his best, you may be sure, to keep close under mama's protecting paws. 

     It seemed impossible to shoot without hitting a dog, but I decided to risk it, and sent a Krag­Jorgensen bullet clean through her body. With the blood streaming from both sides, she con­tinued to fight for her cub, and as more bullets crashed through her body and she felt her hour at hand, her last instinctive movement was to gather the little fellow to her breast with her forepaws, that her tusks might give him pro­tection to the last. Then she died. 

     Feeling his mother's grip upon him relax, the cub climbed upon her body and bravely at­tempted to defend himself. We were not yet so hardened in the stern life of this region that we could step up and put a bullet through the heart of that trusting youngster without suffer­ing qualms of conscience. Soon mother and son were blending their blood there upon the ice. Two of our best dogs had this she-bear killed in her fierce defense of her young. 

     The day before Christmas a lank, lean, hungry bear came near evening up some of the score against his tribe. Though the day was very dark and stormy, I took my usual walk out of doors, to and from the beach. The bear sneaked stealthily after me, and when I turned to walk back toward the sea once more, there he was in the path only a dozen feet away, crouching to spring. For an instant only did I hesitate, and that moment the bear and I stood looking one another in the eye. There was something about his personal appearance I did not like, and instinctively I resented any closer acquaintance with him. Then I raised my arms and shouted at him, and for answer he leaped at me. I sprang to one side, toward a spot where I knew half a dozen dogs had been lying out of the wind, in the lee of a packing box. Two seconds later, I felt a heavy blow upon my shoulder, and as I fell into the snow I had the weight of a big paw on my body. 

     "In another moment," I said to myself, "he will have my head in his mouth."

     But he didn't. At that most interesting juncture I heard the welcome bark of the dogs; they had scented the enemy and leaped to the rescue. That heavy paw was lifted from my back, and as I scrambled up there was the bear, six or eight feet away, with the precious dogs yelping about him. As luck would have it, things turned out a good deal worse for the bear than they did for me. I had only a lame shoulder and a scratch on the neck, while the bear's skin, made into a rug, lies under my feet as I write.