imson all about him, he came to the surface for breath. The upper
ranks of the salmon were still flashing on every side, and half-leaping
out of water within the very sweep of his deadly paw, heedless of his
presence. His hunger being fierce upon him, he now seized a good-sized
fish, bit its backbone through to put an end to its troublesome
struggling, and devoured it as he swam along slowly with the host.

Suddenly, not a dozen feet ahead of his nose, a huge salmon seemed to be
lifted horizontally almost clear of the water. It writhed and thrashed
for a second in a sort of convulsion, then sank with a heavy swirl. The
bear stared curiously. He had never seen anything like that before. The
salmon had not jumped of its own accord, that was evident. It had
apparently been held up from below, firmly and steadily sustained as it
struggled, for that brief space of moments. To the wild creatures
anything new, anything unknown, is always either interesting or
terrifying. The white bear was unacquainted with terror, but he was
interested instantly. He swam toward the spot where the salmon had sunk.

The next moment something still more strange arrested him. A little to
one side of the spot where the salmon had behaved so curiously, a great
sharp-pointed spike of yellow horn, massive and twisted, was thrust up
about three feet above the water and instantly withdrawn. Blood clung
thinly in the convolutions of the horn. It was a mysterious and menacing
weapon. Filled with a curiosity that was now warming into wrath, the
bear made for the spot. There was something like defiance in that sudden
upthrust. Moreover, it seemed that some stranger was poaching on his
fishing-grounds. The bear's wrath flamed into fury in a few seconds.
Unable to see down into the disturbed and discoloured tide, he dived
deep, to get below the salmon and the blood, and see what manner of
rival it was with which he had to deal. Whatever it was, he was going to
drive it off or kill it. He would share his salmon with no one.

Meanwhile, just beneath the lowermost ranks of the horde, a big,
pallid-skinned, fish-like creature was swimming slowly this way and
that. Shaped something like a porpoise, with a big bluff head and
tremendously powerful flukes, it belonged evidently to the great kinship
of the whales. Its massive body was about fourteen feet in length. But
the strange thing about it, setting it wide apart from all its cetacean
kin, was a long, heavy, tw