Four hours this fight went on, the walrus receiving seventy lance thrusts, dangling all the while at the end of the line with the cruel harpoon fixed in his body. When dying at last, hooked by his tusk to the margin of the ice, his female, which had faithfully followed all his bloody fortune, still swam at his side; she retired only when her spouse was dead, and she herself was pricked by the lance. Morton says the last three hours wore the aspect of a doubtful battle. He witnessed it with breathless interest. The game was, by a sort of "double purchase," a clever contrivance of the Esquimo, drawn upon the ice and cut up at leisure. Its weight was estimated at seven hundred pounds. The intestines and the larger part of the carcass, were buried in the crevices of an iceberg--a splendid ice-house! Two sledges were loaded with the remainder, and the hunters started toward home. As they came near the village the women came out to meet them; the shout of welcome brought all hands with their knives. Each one having his portion assigned, according to a well understood Esquimo rule, the evening was given up to eating. In groups of two or three around a forty pound joint, squatting crook-legged, knife in hand, they cut, ate, and slept, and cut and ate again. Hans, in his description of the feast to Dr. Kane, says: "Why, Cappen Ken, sir, even the children ate all night. You know the little two-year-old that Aroin carried in her hood--the one that bit you when you tickled it?" "Yes." "Well, Cappen Ken, sir, that baby cut for herself, sir, with a knife made out of an iron hoop, and so heavy it could hardly lift it, cut and ate, sir, and ate and cut, as long as I looked at it." Morton and Hans returned to the brig with two hundred pounds of walrus meat and two foxes, to make glad the hearts of their comrades. Besides these Arctic monsters of the sea, and shaggy prowlers of the land and ice, there was another sort of game, requiring a different kind of hunting, found nearer home. We have related the experiment, a year before this, of the explorers with the rats. They had failed to smoke them out by a villainous compound, and, as the experience came near burning up the vessel, it was not repeated. They bred like locusts in spite of the darkness, cold, and short rations, and went every-where--under the stove, into the steward's drawers, into the cushions, about the beds, among the furs, woolens, and specimens of natural history. They took up their abode among the bedding of the men in the forecastle, and in such other places as seemed to them cosy and comfortable. When their rights as tenants were disputed they fought for them with boldness and skill.