ved no reply save a broad grin; but the little
fellow followed up this remark, if we may so call it, by drawing his
fingers through his lips, and licking them in a most significant manner.
Meanwhile Annatock advanced rapidly towards the object of interest,
keeping carefully behind hummocks of ice as he went, and soon drew near
enough to make certain that it was a walrus, apparently sound asleep,
with its blunt snout close to its hole, ready to plunge in should an
enemy appear.

Annatock now advanced more cautiously, and when within a hundred yards
of the huge monster, lay down at full length on his breast, and began to
work his way towards it after the manner of a seal. He was so like a
seal in his hairy garments that he might easily have been mistaken for
one by a more intellectual animal than a walrus. But the walrus did not
awake, and he approached to within ten yards. Then, rising suddenly to
his feet, Annatock poised the heavy weapon, and threw it with full force
against the animal's side. It struck, and, as if it had fallen on an
adamantine rock, it bounded off and fell upon the ice, with its hard
point shattered and its handle broken in two.

For one instant Annatock's face blazed with surprise; the next, it
relapsed into fifty dimples, as he roared and tossed up his arms with
delight at the discovery that the walrus had been frozen to death beside
its hole!

This catastrophe is not of unfrequent occurrence to these _elephants_ of
the northern seas. They are in the habit of coming up occasionally
through their holes in the ice to breathe, and sometimes they crawl out
in order to sleep on the ice, secure, in the protection of their
superabundant fat, from being frozen--at least easily. When they have
had enough of sleep, or when the prickling sensation on their skin warns
them that nothing is proof against the cold of the Polar Seas, and that
they will infallibly freeze if they do not make a precipitate retreat to
the comparatively warm waters below, they scramble to their holes, crush
down the new ice with their tusks and thick heads, and plunge in. But
sometimes the ice which forms on the holes when they are asleep is too
strong to be thus broken, in which case the hapless monster lays him
down and dies.

Such was the fate of the walrus which Annatock was now cutting up with
his axe into portable blocks of beef. For several days previous to the
thaw which had now set in, the weather had been intensel