Adventures in Alaska

hold their place at the very top of humorous poems. For besides being fun

s come," the

of many

d ships and

ages an

e sea is b

er pigs h

Alice in Wonderland" in these verses "hits the nail on the head," and, perhaps unwittingly, gives an ins

asted power schooner, P. J. Abler, which sailed along the Alaskan and Siberian coasts for six thousa

speed, bow on, against a huge berg and bring up with a jar that would shake her as a rat shaken by a terrier, and send your plate of polar bear meat into your lap. Then she would recover from her backward bounce and calmly proceed on her way undented and unharmed. Mr. Scull of Philadelphia, who has sailed the world over, could never get used to bumping the ice. He and I would be bent over the chess board, absorbed in a difficult situation, when-bang! would go the schooner against the ice, and recoil, trembling like a hound. I would grab for the tottering chessmen, while Scull would jump right into the air

ving-picture man. He chartered the Abler and hired her crew, who were as cosmopolitan as it is possible for crew to be-the captain, a Swede; the mate, a Dane; the engineers (brothers) Germ

. Elting, was a surgeon of reputation from Albany, N. Y. All were experienced hunters, Scull and Collins having followed trails in Africa and America, Dr. Elting in the Western States and Canada, and Lovering in the West. As for myself, the guest without responsibility o

the outing, I valued the privilege of exploring ground untrodden by the missionary, and, if possible,

ngs existed as automobiles or stiff collars or dinner parties. We had four months of a royal good time-along the Asiatic Coast after Siberian sheep, on the Alaska Peninsula for caribou and brown bears, on Kenai

an Coasts; we captured new species of beetles, moths, butterflies and other insects; the camera fiends and moving

Siberian Coast. Scull and Collins, who had hunted everything in Africa from dikdik to rhinoceros, declared tha

all the larger animals. No thorough study has ever been made of him. More is known of the habits of the extinct woolly elephant-the mammoth, whose bones, tusks, and

the Eskimos pursue him there and cut holes through the thick skin of his flippers unknown to the huge pachyderm, whose hide is impervious to sensation. Then, having passed strong ropes through these holes and tied them to the jutting crags, they raise a hullabaloo, and the walrus, alarmed, precipitating

al brethren, at the General Assembly at Atlanta, a good Doctor of Divinity

d with great solicitude, "that the w

"and therefore he cannot rend or eat anything so very tough as a missionary"; and that moreover his mouth is situated back of a narrow o

kepticism and put this poser: "H

rey?" I

on and other large sea a

t want them. He is only a clam-eater. His tusks are not spears, but an admirably constructed clam-hoe. He could no

t plainly said: "How sad it is that such shameless prevaricators will even slip int

m in the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea, entirely filling the former and in the winter crowding down the latter to about fifty-eight degrees, north latitude. The walrus herds, for the greater part of the year, keep on the borders of this great field of ice. In the summer when the Bering Sea ice melts and also that of the southern part of the Arctic Ocean, the walrus keeps on the flat ice-cakes which f

y miles north of the Siberian Coast. There the little ones are guarded by the cows, which during the summer months are the only really dangerous walrus ever met with. Were the walrus the ferocious and combatant animal he is sometimes depicted, it would be a risky thing indeed to hunt him in skin boats or any other small craft. Imagin

hmidt was taking moving pictures of the walrus herds. He had two catamarans, made by lashing two kyaks together with firm cross pieces. In the foremost craft two Eskimo hunters with their spear

ing it with water. The other kyak of the catamaran tilted dangerously, the Eskimo in the sinking one throwing himself upon it, and the two frightened natives made their escape to the ice-cake. Coming to the surface again the cow sighted Captain K.'s catamaran, thrust her tusks forward again and dived; he saw her body deep in the water coming toward him and thought his time had come; but

g hundreds of walrus, we did not see a cow or calf among them; o

the ice-pack well up towards Wrangell and Herald Islands. We had another week of pounding ice, poking through the narrow "

o weeks of this strenuous fight. This one exception was a big old bull that we sighte

leads" and around the jamming cakes of the ice-field. We saw them at last seemingly right upon the walrus, on the same cake. The big fellow was fast asleep in the uneasy fashion that all walrus and seal have of sleeping; that is, every two or thre

st, which is situated in his neck, and not in what appears to be his head. It was an easy and not very exciting triumph. What possessed this old bull to lie there alone

st of them. We had been driven by buffeting winds and threatening ice-packs away from the vicinity of the islands far westward

milar motion, except that their antenn? are bent downward instead of upward. Sometimes when bunched up they look like immense squirrels. Sometimes when scratching themselves with their flippers they have the languid movements of a fashionable lady fanning herself; and again, wh

of the party; for I was not doing the killing, and was enjoying equally the misses and the hits of the others and, above all, the study of these hu

ge bull to climb the highest pinnacle and keep watch for foes, and that when he grew weary of his vigil and wished to sleep he would prod the bull next to him with his tusks and let him take his turn

eyes are the eyes of a fish, small and rudely constructed and exceptionally nearsighted. They are made for use in the dim depths of the sea. When the sun shines the walrus shut their eyes and apparently cannot ope

The only thing we had to guard against was their getting our wind. If we kept to leeward of them we were always out of their sight. The strange bulging

me places these are massed together; again there will be little open places, and ragged leads, but everywhere ice, ice, ice. And it is all in motion; a slow heaving and grinding of the floe, and the tidal currents moving in different directions and with varied rapidity, but all trending northwest, the landscape-or seascape-cha

d-glass and rifle are by him. "Eskimo Prank" and I are in front of him with our paddles; while Dr. Elting and Collins are in the bow, with paddles in their hands and their big Ross and Mannlicher rifles close by. We corkscrew our way through the ice, steering past a bunch of walrus on a small cake.

x which have been digging clams come up right alongside of us. Suddenly their heads rise high out of the water and their sunken eyes bulge out as they stare up into our faces. It takes a whole minute's scrutiny to satisfy them that we are enemies, and they go down with

rs maneuver about, cautiously but sometimes in plain sight, and discuss, in voices clearly audible three times the distance, the question as to which have the best tusks, which lie most favorably for a good shot, in which hump of the neck the brain lies and just where to shoot. The captain gets his bulky aeroscope placed and sets the engine to buzzing and clacking. The hunters are waiting for the beasts to turn just right so as to exp

-their eyes were shut, or nearly so, and dim when open. Neither can they hear well. They have no external ear at all, only a tiny hole which requires close observation to discover. Even the near roar of a heavy rifle does not always alarm them, and hunters with smaller rifles have killed one after another of a whole

tusks was lying on his back and scratching himself against an ice hummock, wriggling and squirming like a Newfoundland dog. Another was curled up in an impossible heap and scratching the top of his head with his hind flipper. Another was making his way through a bunch of sleepin

ched him with a bamboo fishing-rod, shook his head slowly from side to side with shut eyes and groaned with a dismal falling caden

! How fat and delicious those clams were! And I don't believe there is one of those horrible, malodorous little human bipeds with

ly as they prodded each other with their strong, sharp tusks:

h and roaring defiance; but it was all good nature, for in a minut

droll element; all were so irresistibly funny that I

lindly ahead whichever way they happened to be lying, humping up their backs as they drew their hind flippers under them and stretching out again, just like the "woolly bear" caterpillars I used to tease when a boy. Those that escaped the volley splashed heavily into the water and dived deep, but presently they were all at the surface again, blowing and coughing, bunching in masses, crowding close to the feet of the moving-pi

hy Stone, the Moderator of the Atlanta General Assembly, 1913, that my grand object in going on this hunt was to kill a walrus myself, get his tusks and have a coupl

the hazardous chance and leaped on the ice, placing the muzzles of their rifles almost against the heads of their selection. I was not quick enough to make the jump, but as the oomiak surged back with the receding wave I saw a walrus charging down the sloping ice diagonally from me. Both he and I were moving rapidly and in opposite directions and I could only take a hasty "wing" shot. It was the most difficult shot of all my experience. I was standing uncertainly in the plunging oomiak, swaying and tottering as the light craft shot down the receding wave away from the iceberg

me to the least experienced of the party it seemed as if there was no possible way out, as if we must spend the winter on the bleak shore of Northern Siberia. But always the narrow leads opened before us, and after two or three days of slow and ca

far north as this, and these were the seal and walrus hunters. They depend almost entirel

the Eskimos got a boat ashore and secured a stout line to the ship. Then the eight or nine great carcases on our deck were heaved by the donkey engine into the sea. They would float by this time

f mukluks were cutting up the carcases, and men and women would seize the hunks of meat and rush away to their houses, pursued by scores of wolfish dogs which leaped and snapped at the meat. Occasionally th

cooking was going on, and many were chewing on the raw blubber. It was a day of days to these poor people, and for the first time on our voyage of pleasure we felt ourselves benefactors to the human r

eople of the Arctic shore, was the Bread of Life that I was able to direct t

e United Stat

corrected. Otherwise, the author's original spellin