they now lay asleep and unsuspecting, and we stole cautiously up to them, I in front and Johansen close at my heels. I first went up to the head of the nearer one, which was lying with its back to us. As it had drawn its head well down, and it was difficult to get a shot at a vulnerable point, I passed behind it, and up to the head of the other one. The animals still lay motionless, asleep in the sun. The second was in a better position for a shot, and, when I saw Johansen standing ready at the head of the first, I fired at the back of the neck. The animal turned over a little, and lay there dead. At the report the first started up, but at the same moment received Johansen's bullet. Half stunned, it turned its gigantic body round towards us; in a moment I had discharged the ball from my smooth-bore at it, but, like Johansen, I hit too far forward in the head. The blood streamed from its nostrils and mouth, and it breathed and coughed till the air vibrated. Supporting itself upon its enormous tusks, it now lay still, coughing blood like a consumptive person, and quite indifferent to us. In spite of its huge body and shapeless appearance, which called up to the imagination bogy, giant, and kraken, and other evil things, there was something so gently supplicating and helpless in its round eyes as it lay there that its goblin exterior and one's own need were forgotten in pity for it. It almost seemed like murder. I put an end to its sufferings by a bullet behind the ear, but those eyes haunt me yet; it seemed as if in them lay the prayer for existence of the whole helpless walrus race. But it is lost; it has man as its pursuer. It cannot, however, be denied that we rejoiced at the thought of all the meat and blubber we had now brought down in one encounter; it made up for the cartridges expended upon the one that had sunk. But we had not got them on land yet, and it would be a long piece of work to get them skinned and cut up and brought home. The first thing we did was to go after sledges and knives. As there was a possibility, too, of the ice breaking off and being set adrift, I also thought it wise to take the kayaks on the sledges at the same time, for it had begun to blow a little from the fjord. But for this fortunate precaution it is not easy to say what would have become of us. While we were engaged in skinning, the wind rose rapidly, and soon became a storm. To landward of us was the narrow channel or lane beside which the walruses had been lying. I feared that the ice might open here, and we drift away. While we worked I therefore kept an eye on it to see if it grew broader. It remained unchanged, and we went on skinning as fast as we could. When the first walrus was half skinned, I happened to look landward across the ice, and discovered that it had broken off a good way from us, and that the part on which we stood had already been drifting for some time; there was black water