Kitabı oku: «In Touch with Nature: Tales and Sketches from the Life», sayfa 3
But here is a bigger arrival, a Saltatorial gryllide, a lovely large sea-green grasshopper; his immense ornamental hinder legs put you in mind of steam propellers. He is on my blotting-paper, watching me with his brown wise-looking eyes, ready for a leap at a moment’s notice. I lift my hand to brush a gnat from my ear: whirr! he is off again and out of sight. He doesn’t care where he flies to, and when he does spring away into infinity he can’t have the slightest notion where he will land. What a happy-go-lucky kind of life! What a merry one! He toils not, neither does he spin; he travels where and when he pleases; there is food for him wherever he goes, and nothing to pay for it. A short life, you say? There is no one can prove that, for one hour may seem as long to him as a year to you or to me. To be sure a bird may bolt him, but then he dies in the sunshine and it is all over in a moment.
Here is a tiny elongated Coleopterite who, as soon as he alights for a rest, folds away his wings under his tippet (elytra). He does not bite them off as some silly she-ants do. For as soon as the sun blinks out again this insect will unfold his wings and be off once more, and he may perhaps alight in some human being’s eye before evening and be drowned in a tear.
There are some of an allied species, but so very very tiny that when they get on to my manuscript while I am writing, they are as bewildered as I have been before now on an Arctic ice-field. Perhaps they get a kind of snow-blind. At all events they feel their way about, and if they chance to come to a word I have just written, they dare not cross it for fear of getting drowned – every stroke of my pen is to one of these wee mites a blue rolling river of ink. So they’ve got to walk round.
Here is a new-born Aphis (green-fly). It is still green. It has not been bronzed yet, and its wings are the most delicate gauze. It does not seem to know a bit what to do, or where to go, or what it has been put into the world for, any more than a human philosopher.
This wee thing takes advantage of a glint of sunshine and essays to fly, but a puff of wind catches him, and, as “the wind bloweth where it listeth,” he has to go with it. He will be blown away and away, thousands and thousands of midges’ miles away. He will never come back to this part of the wood, never see any of his relations – if he has any – again. Away and away, to the back of the north wind perhaps; he may be swallowed by a bat or a sand-marten; he may be impaled on a thorn or drowned in a dewdrop, or alight on the top of a pond and get gobbled up by a minnow; but, on the other hand, he may be blown safe and sound to some far-off land beyond the Thames, settle down, get married, and live happy for ever afterwards.
Clack – clack – clack – clack! A great wild pigeon has alighted on the pine-tree above me. I have been so quiet, she does not know I am here. I cough, and click – clack – click go her wings, and off she flies sideways, making a noise for all the world like the sound of that whirling toy children call “a thunder-spell.”
But she has knocked down a cone. It is still green, but somehow the sight of it takes me far away north to bonnie Scotland, and I am roaming, a boy once more, on a wild moorland, where grow, here and there, tiny pine-trees – seedlings, that owe their habitat, if not existence, to the rooks, who have carried cones like these from the forests. Like Byron, “I rove a young Highlander o’er the dark heath.”
“I arise with the dawn, with my dog as my guide,
From mountain to mountain I’m bounding along,
I am breasting the billows of Dee’s rushing tide,
And hear at a distance the Highlander’s song.”
I close my eyes, and it all comes back, that wild and desolate but dearly-loved scene; the banks where lizards bask; the “pots” and the ponds in that broad moor, where teal-ducks swim, and near which the laughing snipe has her nest; I hear the wild whistle of the whaup or curlew, and the checker of the stone-hatch in the cairn. I am wading among crimson heath and purple heather, where the crowberry and cranberry grow in patches of green. And now I have wandered away to the deep, dark forest itself; and near to a kelpie’s pool, by the banks of a stream, I lay me down to rest. There are myriads of bees in the lime-trees above, through which the sunshine shimmers, lighting up the leaves to a tenderer green, but the bees begin to talk, and the murmuring stream begins to sing, and presently I find myself in Elfin-land, in the very midst of a fairy revel.
The “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a masterpiece of art, but nothing to this. That was a mere phantasy; this is a reality. This is —
“Pa! papa!”
I start up. I am still in my woodland study. But a sweet young face is bending over me, and tender eyes are looking into mine.
“Pa, dear, how sound you have been asleep! Do you know it is nearly sunset?”
“Have I? Is it?” I reply, smiling. “I thought, Ida, you were queen of Elfin-land.”
It is my tiny daughter who has come toddling up to the wood to seek for me.
Three minutes after this, we are tooling down the hill homewards, and Ida – my own little queen of the elves – is seated on the cycle beside me.
Chapter Five.
Summer Life in Norland Seas
“To the ocean now I fly
And those Norland climes that lie
Where Day never shuts his eye.”
“And nought around, howe’er so bright,
Could win his stay, or stop his flight
From where he saw the pole-star’s light
Shine o’er the north.”
It was no wonder that, with the snow lying deep around our dwelling, and the storm-wind rattling our windows of a night, and howling and “howthering” around the chimnies, both Frank’s thoughts and my own should be carried away to the wild regions of the Pole, where both of us had spent some years of our lives; or that I should have been asked one night to relate some of my experiences of Greenland seas and their strange animal inhabitants, seals and bears among the rest.
I related, among other things —
How Seals are Caught in Greenland
“That sealing trip,” I said, “I shall never forget. My particular friend the Scotch doctor, myself, and Brick the dog, were nearly always hungry; many a midnight supper we went in for, cooked and eaten under the rose and forecastle.”
Friday night was sea-pie night, by the universal custom of the service. The memory of that delicious sea-pie makes my month water even now, when I think of it.
The captain came down one morning from the crow’s-nest – a barrel placed up by the main truck, the highest position in the ship from which to take observations – and entered the saloon, having apparently just taken leave of his senses. He was “daft” with excitement; his face was wreathed in smiles, and the tears of joy were standing in his eyes.
“On deck, my boys, on deck with you, and see the seals!”
The scene we witnessed on running aloft into the rigging was peculiarly Greenlandish. The sun had all the bright blue sky to himself – not the great dazzling orb that you are accustomed to in warmer countries, but a shining disc of molten silver hue, that you can look into and count the spots with naked eye. About a quarter of a mile to windward was the main icepack, along the edge of which we were sailing under a gentle topsail breeze. Between and around us lay the sea, as black as a basin of ink. But everywhere about, as far as the eye could see from the quarter-deck, the surface of the water was covered with large beautiful heads, with brilliant earnest eyes, and noses all turned in one direction – that in which our vessel was steering, about south-west and by south. Nay, but I must not forget to mention one peculiar feature in the scene, without which no seascape in Greenland would be complete. Away on our lee-bow, under easy canvas, was the Green Dutchman. This isn’t a phantom ship, you must know, but the most successful of all ships that ever sailed the Northern Ocean. Her captain – and owner – has been over twenty years in the came trade, and well deserves the fortune that he has made by his own skill and industry.
If other proof were wanting that we were among the main body of seals, the presence of that Green Dutchman afforded it; besides, yonder on the ice were several bears strolling up and down, great yellow monsters, with the ease and self-possession of gentlemen waiting for the sound of the last dinner gong or bugle. Skippers of ships might err in their judgment, the great Green Dutchman himself might be at fault, but the knowledge and the instinct of Bruin is infallible.
We were now in the latitude of Jan Mayen; the tall mountain cone of that strange island we could distinctly see, raised like an immense shining sugar-loaf against the sky’s blue. To this lonely spot come every year, through storm and tempest, in vessels but little bigger or better than herring-boats, hardy Norsemen, to hunt the walrus for its skin and ivory, but by other human feet it is seldom trodden. It is the throne of King Winter, and the abode of desolation, save for the great bear that finds shelter in its icy caves, or the monster seals and strange sea-birds that rest on its snow-clad rocks. At this latitude the sealer endeavours to fall in with the seals, coming in their thousands from the more rigorous north, and seeking the southern ice, on which to bring forth their young. They here find a climate which is slightly more mild, and never fail to choose ice which is low and flat, and usually protected from the south-east swell by a barrier of larger bergs. The breeding takes place as soon as the seals take the ice, the males in the meantime removing in a body to some distant spot, where they remain for three weeks or so, looking very foolish – just, in truth, as human gentlemen would under like circumstances – until joined by the ladies. The seal-mothers are, I need hardly say, exceedingly fond of their young. At all other times timid in the extreme, they will at this season defend them with all the ferocity of bears. The food of the seals in nursing season consists, I believe, of the small shrimps with which the sea is sometimes stained for miles, like the muddy waters of the Bristol Channel, and also, no doubt, of the numerous small fishes to be found burrowing, like bees in a honeycomb, on the under surface of the pieces of ice. The wise sealer “dodges” outside, or lies aback, watching and wary, for a fortnight at least, until the young seals are lumpy and fat, then the work of death begins. I fear I am digressing, but these remarks may be new to some readers.
“The Green Dutchman has filled her fore-yard, sir, and is making for the ice;” thus said the first mate to the captain one morning.
“Let the watch make sail,” was the order, “and take the ice to windward of her.”
The ship is being “rove” in through the icebergs, as far and fast as sail will take her. Meanwhile, fore and aft, everybody is busy on board, and the general bustle is very exciting. The steward is serving out the rum, the cook’s coppers are filled with hams, the hands not on deck are busy cleaning their guns, sharpening their knives, getting out their “lowrie tows” (dragging-ropes), and trying the strength of their seal-club shafts by attempts to break them over their hardy knees. The doctor’s medical preparations are soon finished; he merely pockets a calico bandage and dossel of lint, and straps a tourniquet around his waist, then devotes his attention exclusively to his accoutrements. Having thus arranged everything to his entire satisfaction, he fills a sandwich-case, then a brandy-flask and baccy-pouch, and afterwards eats and drinks as long as he can – to pass the time, he says – then, when he can’t eat a morsel more, he sits and waits and listens impatiently, beating the devil’s tattoo with his boot on the fender. Presently it is “Clew up,” and soon after, “All hands over the side.”
The day was clear and bright and frosty, and the snow crisp and hard. There was no sinking up to the knees in it. You might have walked on it with wooden legs. Besides, there was but little swell on, so the movement of the bergs was slow, and leaping easy.
Our march to the sealing-ground was enlivened by a little logomachy, or wordy war, between the first mate and the doctor. The latter began it:
“Harpooneers and clubmen,” he cried, “close up behind me, here; I’m gaun to mak’ a speech; but keep movin’ a’ the time – that’s richt. Well, first and foremost, I tell ye, I’m captain and commander on the ice; d’ye hear?”
“You commander!” exclaimed the mate; “I’ll let ye ken, my lad, that I’m first officer o’ the ship.”
“Look here, mate,” said the doctor, “I’ll no lose my temper wi’ ye, but if ye interrupt me again, by ma sang, ye’ll ha’ to fecht me, and ye ken ye havena the biceps o’ a daddy-lang-legs, nor the courage o’ a cockney weaver, so keep a calm sough. – Now, men,” he continued, “I, your lawfully constituted commander, tell ye this: there is to be nae cruelty, this day, to the innocent lambs we’re here to kill. Mind ye, God made and cares for a’ His creatures. But I’m neither going to preach or pray, but I’ll put it to ye in this fashion. If I see one man Jack of ye put a knife in a seal that he hasna previously clubbed and killed, I’ll simply ca’ that man’s harns oot (dash his brains out) to begin wi’, and if he does it again, I’ll stop his ’bacca for the entire voyage, and his grog besides.”
Probably the last threat was more awful to a sailor than actual braining. At all events, it had the desired effect, for during the whole of that day I saw nothing among our men but slaughter as humane as slaughter could be made. Even then, however, there was much to harrow the feelings of any one at all sensitive. For the young Greenland seal is such an innocent little thing, so beautiful, so tender-eyed, and so altogether like a baby in a blanket, that killing it is revolting to human nature. Besides, they are so extremely confiding. Raise one in your arms – it will give a little petted grumble, like a Newfoundland puppy, and suck your fingers; not finding its natural sustenance in that performance, it will open its mouth, and give vent to a plaintive scream for its ma, which will never fail in bringing that lady from the depths beneath, eager-eyed and thirsting for your life.
Towards the middle of the day I strolled among the crew of the P – e. The men were wildly excited, half-drunk with rum, and wholly with spilling blood, singing and shouting and blaspheming, striking home each blow with a terrible oath, flinching before the blood had ceased to flow, and sometimes, horrible to say, flinching the unhappy innocents alive. All sorts of shocking cruelties were perpetrated, in order to make puppies scream, and thus entice the mother to the surface to be shot or clubbed. I saw one fellow – Pah! I can’t go on.
Blood shows to advantage on ice. Here there were oceans of it. The snow was pure and white and dazzling in the morning – I leave it to the imagination of the sentimental to guess its appearance at eventide. The stout Shetlandmen, with their lowrie tows, dragged the skins to the ship. There were no regular meals any day during sealing. The crew fed and drank alike, when they could and what they could. There was but little sport in all this – a certain wild excitement, to be sure, quite natural under the circumstances, for were we not engaged in one of the lawful pursuits of commerce and making money? The bears were having fine times of it, for there was but little inclination on our part to pursue them, while there were seals to slay; and Bruin seemed to know this, and was correspondingly bold and impertinent, although never decidedly aggressive; for compared to seals men are merely skin and bone, and Bruin has a penchant for adiposity.
In ten days there was not a seal left, for ships had collected from all quarters – like war-horses scenting the battle from afar, or like sea-gulls on “making-off” days – to assist in the slaughter. By-the-by, what peculiar instinct or what sense is it that enables those sea-gulls to determine the presence of carrion in the water at almost incredible distances? On making-off days – that is, idle days at sea – when, there being nothing else to do, the hands are employed in separating the blubber from the skins, putting them in different tanks and casting the offal overboard, there shall not be a single gull in sight from the crow’s-nest, even within ken of the telescope; but when, twenty minutes afterwards, the work is well begun, the sea shall be white with those gulls, singly or in clusters fighting for the dainty morsels of flesh and blubber.
We got frozen in after this, and in a fortnight’s time we found ourselves forsaken by the bears, and even by the birds, both of which always follow the seals.
What a lonely time we had of it for the next month, in the centre of that silent, solitary icepack! But for the ships that lay here and there, frozen in like ourselves, it might have been mistaken for some snow-clad moorland in the dead of winter. And all the time there never was a cloud in the blue sky, even as big as a man’s hand; the sun shone there day and night but gave no heat, and the silence was like the silence of space – we could have heard a snow-flake fall.
Once a week, at least, a gale of wind might be blowing, hundreds of miles away from where we were – it was always calm in the pack – then the great waves would come rolling in beneath the ice, though of course we could not see them, lifting up the giant bergs, packing and pitching the light bay-ice over the heavy, and grinding one against the other or against our seemingly doomed ship with a shrieking, deafening noise, that is quite indescribable. We thus lived in a constant state of suspense, with our traps always packed and ready to leave the vessel if she were “nipped.” One ship had gone down before our very eyes, and another lay on the top of the ice on her beam ends, with the keel exposed.
But clouds and thaw came at last, and we managed, by the aid of ice-saws and gunpowder, to cut a canal and so get free and away into the blue water once more.
“Were you not glad?” said Maggie May.
“Yes, glad we all were, yet I do not regret my experience, for in that solitary ice-field we were indeed alone with Nature. And, Maggie May, being alone with Nature is being alone with God.”
“Ah! Frank,” I added, “it is amid such scenes as these, and while surrounded with danger, that one learns to pray.”
“True, lad, true,” said Uncle Frank solemnly, “and strange and many are the wonders seen by those who go down to the sea in ships.”
Chapter Six.
Face to Face with Ice-Bears
“Why, ye tenants of the lake,
For me your wat’ry haunts forsake?
Tell me, fellow-creatures, why
At my presence thus you fly?
Conscious, blushing for our race,
Soon, too soon, your fears I trace;
Man, your proud usurping foe,
Would be lord of all below,
Plumes himself in Freedom’s pride,
Tyrant stern to all beside.”
Burns.
“If ever a true lover of Nature lived,” said Frank one winter’s evening, as we all sat round the fire as usual, “it was your Scottish bard, the immortal Burns.”
“Yes,” I said, “no one was ever more sensible than he that a great gulf is fixed between our lower fellow-creatures and us – a gulf formed and deepened by ages of cruelty towards them. We fain – some of us at least – would cross that gulf and make friends with the denizens of field and forest, but ah! Frank, they will not trust us. I can fancy the gentle Burns walking through the woods, silently, on tiptoe almost, lest he should disturb any portion of the life and love he saw all about him, or cause distress to any one of God’s little birds or beasts. See the wounded hare limp past him! – poor wee wanderer of the wood and field – look at the tears streaming over the ploughman’s cheeks as he says:
“‘Seek, mangled wretch, some place of wonted rest —
No more of rest, but now thy dying bed!
The sheltering rushes whistling o’er thy head,
The cold earth with thy bleeding body prest.’”
“And what,” said Frank, “can equal the pitiful pathos and simplicity of his address to the mouse whose nest in autumn has been turned up by the ploughshare?
“‘Thy wee bit housie too in ruin,
It’s silly wa’s, the winds are strewin’,
An’ naething, now to big a new ane
O’ foggage green,
An bleak December’s winds ensuin’,
Both snell and keen.’”
(Big means build; snell means keen.)
“Yes, Frank, and he says in that same sweet and tender poem:
“‘I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill-opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!’”
“Well,” replied Frank, “I’m very much of Burns’s way of thinking; I would like to be friends with all my fellow-mortals, and have reason to believe it is really man’s cruelty that has broken the spell that should bind us.
“Why, away up in the north, the biggest beast in the sea is the simplest and the best-natured. I mean the whale. The birds are so tame you can almost catch them alive, and even bears will pass you by if you do not seek to molest them.”
“Tell us some bear stories, Frank.”
Frank accordingly cleared his throat.
“What I tell you, then, about Polar bears,” he said, “you may believe. My facts are true facts, not ordinary facts, and I gained my experience myself, and neither from books nor from imagination. But talking about books,” he continued, pulling one down from the shelf and spreading it open before him, “here is one on natural history, and as there are pictures in it, it will be sure to please you. The book is not an old one, and is a reputed authority. Well, look at that. That is supposed to be a Polar bear just come out of a cave, and having a sniff round. It is more the shape of a dormouse that has lost its tail in a trap.
“Here again is the picture of a dismantled barque, apparently stranded on the top of Mount Ararat, and in the foreground a lot of very ordinary looking men with billycock hats and very ordinary looking axes and spades, making an ice-canal to the water, at the edge of which another bear or dormouse is standing up quietly to be shot.
“One more illustration. Glance at this! three bears close under the bows of a ship among the ice; one lies dead beside a spit-kid; another is sitting thinking; and a third is walking on his hind-legs towards a group of men, who are evidently poised to receive cavalry, with duck-guns and old-fashioned battle-axes.
“The text is quite on a keeping with the illustrations – that is, hardly in accordance with Nature.
“We read in travellers’ tales wonderful accounts of the size, strength, cunning, and extreme ferocity of the Polar bear. I used to believe all I read, even Jack the Giant-Killer. But nevertheless, as to ferocity and strength, there is no doubt that our Arctic friend is king of the ursine race. It took me a whole year to settle in my own mind whether this bear was actually a bold, brave beast or the reverse. From all I have seen and heard he undoubtedly possesses bravery, but it is tempered with a deal of discretion. He is not like the old Norse kings; he does not kill men for the mere sake of making a record. He fights for food and not for glory. If a man and seal were both lying asleep on the ice, I believe a hungry bear would prefer his customary diet, and leave the man in peaceful possession of his dreams. But if the man awoke while the bear was having his mouthful or two – he does not eat much of a seal – then I guess the consequences would be rather serious for one of the party. Yet I came upon a bear once behind a hummock of ice that, I am sure, had been fast asleep till I fired my rifle at something else quite close to him. He might have killed me then easily, but I assure you he did not. He emitted a sound as if he had swallowed about three yards of trombone and was trying to cough it up again. Then he ran away.
“But another day I ran away. I was two miles from my ship and burst my gun. I wasn’t going to stop and fight that bear with the butt-end – not likely; but he followed me nearly halfway. Our spectioneer, dear old man, saw the race from the crow’s-nest, and sent men out to meet us. He said at dinner that he had saved my life; but according to him, he saved my life more than once and in more ways than one. He must have been always saving my life, I suppose; but then I was young and headstrong. That spectioneer of ours, although he must have been nearly fifty years of age, was a kind of Donald Dinnie in strength. He fought an Arctic bear once single-handed and with no other weapon save a seal-club. The man is still alive; the bear isn’t.
“The spectioneer did not force the fighting, remember. He rounded the corner of a large hummock of ice, and came upon the foe quite unexpectedly. One lucky but fearful blow pierced the upper part of the brute’s neck close behind the ear, and he fell dead. A seal-club is a terrible weapon in the hands of a strong man. It is in shape somewhat like a pole-axe, only the iron or steel portion is sharp, and not blunt. Our spectioneer was one of the best and bravest seamen ever I sailed with, and one of the most modest of men. I remember laughing once when he told me that he would as soon fight a bear with a seal-club as a bladder-nosed seal. I did not know much about this species of seal then. I believe there is some Irish blood in the brute, for at any time, whether in the water or out of it, he will as soon fight as not, and woe be to you when he cocks his crest if you have only a club, and no rifle wherewith to defend yourself!
“Ever hear tell of the mad surgeon who fought the Polar bear? I’ll tell you the story, then, as it was told to me, and I have no reason to doubt its accuracy in the main details.
“Dr C – was a young medical man, just newly passed. He was to have been married very shortly after the capping and gowning ceremony, but had a few hasty words with his affianced, bade her an angry farewell, and took steamer to Lerwick some weeks before the arrival of the Greenland fleet at that ancient place, in the hopes of finding a ship that was in want of a surgeon. He was not disappointed; one of the doctors wished to go back; the voyage from Hull to Lerwick had been quite enough for him, so Dr C – took his place.
“Now Dr C – was reckless; he confessed that he cared very little what he did, or what became of him; he had loved the girl that he had meant to make his wife very dearly, and now that he had lost her he didn’t mind, he said, although a whale swallowed him, and he thought he could sleep as comfortably, and far more soundly, in Davy Jones’s locker than anywhere else.
“He showed he was reckless even before he left Lerwick. It was usual in those days for the youthful surgeons of the fleet to assemble for the purpose of eating, drinking, and carousing at the only respectable hotel in the town, and having well primed themselves, to march in a body through the narrow streets. This used to lead to cruel fights, in which the medicos were very often worsted. But on this particular year Dr C – went in for organisation, as he called it. He armed and drilled the fleet surgeons, and in person he used to lead them out to fight, and in consequence the riots lasted often long into the night, despite the efforts of the police and military – five men and a sergeant – to quell them.
“After his ship sailed, Dr C – took to vinous imbibition – in plain English, he drank rum to excess. The ship got frozen in about a week after arrival ‘in the country,’ and by this time the surgeon was so ill that he was confined to bed. Literally speaking, confined to bed, for he had to be strapped to it. One day he heard the captain and first mate talking about the large number of bears that were about, and so quiet did he become after this that restraint was thought no longer necessary. It was early in the season, and the sun still set, and the night, or rather dusk, was of about two hours’ duration. When a ship is beset in the ice the commander naturally enough is anxious in mind, and spends a good deal of his time in the crow’s-nest with his eye at the glass. The commander of Dr C – ’s ship was in the crow’s-nest very early one morning, and, somewhat to his surprise, saw what he took to be a seal lying on a hummock about half a mile off. It lay very still and motionless, and was very black. It was not long before he noticed something else – an immense bear coming stalking down towards the dark object on the ice.
“So intently was he watching the movements of the bear that he did not notice the trap-door of the nest move. It was the steward that had run up to tell him that the doctor was not to be found anywhere in the ship.
“In a moment the truth flashed upon the captain’s mind. He hailed the deck below, and in less than a minute a party of ten men, rifle-armed, were over the side and away to the surgeon’s assistance.
“There was nothing further for the captain to do but watch proceedings through the glass. I was not there, of course, so can only imagine what an exciting scene it must have been, for the captain in his crow’s-nest to witness that man and bear fight.
“The doctor it seems was neither tall nor strong – a thin wiry little fellow, more fit to contend with a badger than a bear. He had armed himself with his longest amputating knife, which he had tied to his wrist and hand, in such a way that it could neither slip nor be dropped. The captain saw the bear spring upon the man and rise with him, and fall again and roll with him, and he saw the doctor plunge the knife again and again into the brute’s body; then both fell and both lay still. When the men arrived it was to find Bruin dead enough, and the surgeon just breathing. He was fearfully lacerated in the back and legs, but, strange to say, he survived, and before the ship returned to Lerwick he was clothed and in his right mind.
“I have a great respect for my friend the Arctic bear; I cannot help admiring his immensity, his power of endurance, his wonderful swimming capabilities, and his great sagacity, which latter he shows in a hundred different ways, known only to those who have thoroughly studied the tricks and the manners of the monster.
