"In this hunt, as in all other walrus hunts I was in, I had a hard time
in trying not to take a crack at the floats. They were black, and jumped
around in the weirdest way, so that they appeared to be alive. I knew
that if I shot one, I would never hear the last of it, so took good
care.

"Another time we went for a herd of fifty-odd walruses that were
sleeping on the ice. The wind was blowing fairly hard, and it is never
easy to shoot accurately from a whale-boat which is doing a cake-walk in
the arms of a choppy sea. When we got twenty yards from the ice cake, we
began to fire. I hit a couple of walruses, but did not kill them, and
with fierce grunts the huge brutes wriggled into the sea. They were
coming our way, and all hands stood by to show the visitors how we loved
to speed the parting guest--our way of showing this being the vocal and
instrumental method already described.

"Wesharkoopsi, an Eskimo, who stood right behind me and who had been
telling us what an expert he was with the harpoon, was making
threatening gestures which boded ill for any walrus that came near us.

"Suddenly, with a loud 'Ook! Ook!' a bull rose like a giant
jack-in-the-box right alongside of me, giving us a regular shower bath,
and he got both tusks on the gunwale of the boat.

"Wesharkoopsi was not expecting a fight at such close quarters, and he
got badly rattled. Instead of throwing his harpoon he dropped it, yelled
madly, and began to spit in the monster's face. It is needless to state
that we never again took Wesharkoopsi walrus-hunting in a whale-boat.

"The others were shouting, swearing in English and Eskimo at
Wesharkoopsi, the walrus, and everything in general; some were trying to
hit the brute, others to back water.

"I was not eager just then to test the soundness of one arctic
explorer's dictum: 'If a walrus gets his tusks over the side of the
boat, you must not hit him, as such a course would induce him to back
water and upset you; but gently grasp the two-thousand-pound monster by
the tusks and drop him overboard'--or words to that effect. If this one
had got his tusks a quarter inch further my way, he would have had them
clear over the gunwale; so I held my rifle at port arms, stuck its
business end into the visitor's face, and let him have it--which settled
his account.

"That walrus had tried to upset us, but almost immediately another one
tried a new variation of the game, an almost successful effort to sink