But this is all nonsense. The fact is that the walrus cannot see more than ten or twelve feet at the most, and even at that distance I doubt whether he can distinguish more than the mere outlines of any object. His 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 open them. When alarmed they rush into the water and then come up and will crowd within five or six feet of the moving-picture man or hunter, bulging their eyes like those of a crab in frantic attempts to see their foe. We clad ourselves in white muslin parkas, and got our _oomiaks_ or _kyaks_ boldly up under the noses of these great beasts with them staring down upon us. 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 of the eyes when excited gives a most grotesque appearance to the countenance of these walrus, as ordinarily their eyes are deep sunken in their heads. Let me sketch a picture from life: It is the twentieth of August. We are in the vicinity of Cape North on the Northern Siberian coast. We are twenty or thirty miles offshore. The day is warm, sunny, still. The ship is tied to a large iceberg; a wilderness of floating ice-cakes stretches in every direction to the horizon. In some 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--changing every minute. There are herds of walrus all around us, some numerous, containing two or three hundred on one cake of ice, others small; here a group of four or five big bulls on a cake just large enough to hold them; then fifteen or twenty on a wider berg with little hummocks, up the slopes of which the big brutes crowd. Scull and Lovering have taken the kyak-catamaran and are paddling to the nearest bunch of walrus not five hundred yards from the ship. Captain K. has launched the big skin boat, or _oomiak_, and is perched on the high stern, steering. His aeroscope moving-picture machine and graphlex camera, his field-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. "Small ice--lose um quick," says Prank. We are heading to a herd of twenty or thirty, with some big tuskers among them. We keep to the leeward of them, for the sense of smell seems to be their one keen sense, and even that does not compare in acuteness with the nose of the polar bear or the caribou.