After a week's work the walls of our hut were finished. They were not high, scarcely 3 feet above the ground; but we had dug down the same distance into the ground, so we reckoned that it would be high enough to stand up in. Now the thing was to get it roofed, but this was not so easy. The only materials we had towards it were, as before mentioned, the log we had found and the walrus hides. The log, which was quite 12 inches across, Johansen at last, after a day's work, succeeded in cutting in two with our little axe, and with no less labor we rolled it up over the talus and on to the level, and it was laid on the roof as the ridgepiece. Then there were the hides; but they were stiff and frozen fast to the meat and blubber heaps which they covered. With much difficulty we at length loosened them by using wedges of walrus tusks, stone, and wood. To transport these great skins over the long distance to our hut was a no less difficult matter. However, by rolling them, carrying them, and dragging them we accomplished this too; but to get the frozen skins stretched over the hut was the worst of all. We got on pretty well with three half-skins, just managing to bend them a little; but the fourth half was frozen quite stiff, and we had to find a hole in the ice, and sink it in the sea, to thaw it. It was almost a cause for anxiety, I thought, that all this time we saw nothing of any bears. They were what we had to live upon all through the winter, and the six we had would not go far. I thought, however, that it might easily be accounted for, as the fjord-ice, to which the bear prefers to keep, had taken its departure on the day when we had nearly drifted out to sea with the walruses, and I thought that, when the ice now formed again, bears would appear once more. It was therefore a relief when one morning (September 23d) I caught sight of a bear in front of me, just as I came round the promontory to look at the skin that we had in soak in the sea. It was standing on the shore close by the skin. It had not seen me, and I quickly drew back to let Johansen, who was following with his gun, pass me, while I ran back to fetch mine. When I returned, Johansen lay on the same spot behind a stone, and had not fired. There were two bears, one by the hut and one by the shore; and Johansen could not get up to the one without being seen by the other. When I had gone after my gun the bear had turned its steps towards the hut; but just as it reached it Johansen suddenly saw two bear's paws come quickly over the edge of the wall and hit out at the first bear, and a head followed immediately after. This fellow was busily gnawing at our roof hides, which he had torn down and bent, so that we had to put them into the sea too, to get them thawed. The first bear had to retreat to the shore once more, where we afterwards discovered it had drawn up our hide and had been scraping the fat off it. Under cover of some hummocks we now ran towards it. It noticed us, and set off