The seal has other enemies to contend with besides man. The bear has a keen scent, a heavy paw, a huge appetite, and a peculiar relish for her young. He, too, wanders out on the sealing grounds at the proper season, and having found a cavern, sets his two huge forepaws on the snow and, with one mighty push, breaks it all in. He easily hooks the helpless little creature beneath, and devours it with ursine relish. Or it may be that an arctic fox decides to spend a day seal hunting. He glides over the snow, an almost invisible shape, like nothing so much as a white wraith of the desolation around. His scent having guided him to a likely spot, and being unable, like the bear, to do his housebreaking by mere brute force, he adopts a peculiarly wicked plan of his own. Planting all four feet together pivot-fashion, he spins himself round and round, his claws boring a way through the snow, until he corkscrews his unwelcome presence into the seal’s retreat. The baby, again, falls a helpless victim. This seal hunting of the tribesmen, far out at sea in the camp on the ice, is not without its dangers, as the following tale will show. For several weeks all had gone prosperously with the sealers. The weather had been good, and the young seals plentiful. Loaded sleds had been continually going to and fro between the winter village on shore and the village on the ice, bearing meat and skins to the old folk at home. Contentment and jollity reigned, for had not the Conjurors guaranteed prosperity and good luck, and were their prophecies not amply fulfilled? But, one day, the sky became overcast. Hour after hour it grew more heavily banked with forbidding cloud, whilst from seaward came a low roar, the presage of an arctic storm. The sealers hastily retreated to their dwellings, and blocked up their doors, and prepared to wait. Evening drew nigh, and the tempest rose. An occasional quiver of the icy floor told of the pounding of heavy breakers at the floe edge, and a portentous shiver now and again spoke of masses of it being broken away. With the indifference which comes of familiarity with danger, these hardy northern folk stayed out there in camp, on the very edge as it were of death; and as the night drew on, merely rolled themselves in their fur blankets and went to sleep, confident that the morning would see an abatement in the storm. Nevertheless, it went on increasing and grew more and more violent. The shivering dogs scratched holes for themselves in the snow on the lee side of the igloos, and buried themselves as deeply as they could. At length the Eskimo instinct of peril was aroused, and an intuitive sense of the full extent of the catastrophe at hand (a sense not developed to any marked degree among civilised peoples), roused the entire camp.