To understand the activities of the sealing camp it is necessary to know something of the habits of the seal in the breeding season. For some time before the baby creature is born, for instance, the mother has been preparing a house for it. She does not give birth in the water nor on the surface of the snow, for the obvious reasons of the cold and of the possible presence of enemies. She makes a hole in the sea ice big enough for her to get through, and proceeds to scrabble out an airy cavern in the deep layer of snow above, leaving a sort of shelf or flooring of clear ice upon which she can lie in safety and bring her young to birth. This place is—comparatively—warm, dry, and even cosy. It is within immediate reach of the hole through which she can dive back into the water at a moment’s alarm, and it is almost completely hidden from above. The baby is left in this cavern while the mother seeks food, and it lives there until, after a series of short educational excursions in the water, it has learnt to hunt for itself, and its lungs have accustomed themselves to the conditions of the adult seal’s existence. Frequently indeed the baby gets drowned! The mother may have heard some noise above which has alarmed her. Fearing danger, she has thrust her head up through the diving hole, caught hold of the young one, and hastily retreated with it to a depth unsuitable for its tender lungs, with a sad and fatal result. The Eskimo sealer knows all this natural history as he knows that of every other denizen of the Arctic, and founds upon it his methods in hunting. Directly he has detected the locality of a seal’s nursing cavern under his feet, either by the presence of a slight depression in the snow, or by the pointing of the dog, he arms himself with a nixie, or hook on the end of a long shaft, and gathering himself together makes a tremendous jump into the air, coming down with all his weight and force upon the spot. He jumps again and again, until at last the snow caves in and blocks the hole below, cutting off the baby seal’s retreat into the sea beneath. Then he prods and probes among the débris of the cavern for the imprisoned creature, locates it, hooks it out, and kills it with one blow on the head. After that, there is the mother to be caught. She is probably lurking under the ice nearby. So, before he kills the little one, the hunter ties his sealing line to one of its flippers and pushes it through the diving hole into the water. The mother at once tries to come to its rescue, only to encounter her own devoted death. She, too, is hooked, dragged out, and despatched.