_A propos_ of shooting, the following curiously improbable personal incident is perhaps worth narrating:—One evening, shortly before the ship broke out of winter quarters, I took my rifle and went shoreward to try and find a hare, but, after a long search, was returning unsuccessful, when I happened to discover a king-duck swimming about in a small lake; there was little chance of hitting her, but she would at any rate give an excuse for a shot. After trying for twenty minutes to get within moderate range, it was plain that there was nothing for it but to walk straight up through the crunching snow; but the bird’s patience was exhausted, and she rose on the wing a good hundred yards off. In sheer annoyance and chagrin I fired, when, most unexpectedly, out flew the feathers and down fell the duck. On going to pick her up, marvelling greatly at the Munchausen-like luck of the shot, and hoping that the hole was not through the best part of the bird, what was my amazement to discover that she was not only alive, but perfectly unhurt. Turn her over how I would, there was not a speck of blood on the feathers, or a scratch on any part of the body. At last the secret was discovered; the bullet had clipped the pinions off one wing, and the fall had stunned the bird. She afterwards lived some time in captivity in a hen-coop, and laid two eggs. We had not spent many days roaming over our newly uncovered lands, before we began to suspect that tracks of game were, in our part of the Arctic regions at any rate, extremely misleading. On the way northward, whenever the ship came to a standstill amongst the floes, men and officers often made hurried visits to the shore, and invariably came off with the stereotyped report that “traces of game were numerous and recent.” We found so many traces and so little game that the phrase acquired an inverted meaning, and passed into a proverb, but the discrepancy remained unaccounted for. At Floeberg Beach tracks of game were certainly numerous enough. The hard frozen mud at the margins of every pool showed footprints of birds, often so sharp and distinct that “rubbings” with pencil and paper were easily made of them, and sometimes in relief where dust had filled the impression and ice evaporation afterwards lowered the mould. In some places tracks of musk oxen were abundant, and of every size, from the little round footprints of calves to the broad hoof-marks of full-grown animals; but there was absolutely no way of telling when or in what numbers the game had been there. Once frozen, a footprint may last indefinitely, especially if protected by snow; and, for aught we could prove to the contrary, some of the tracks may have been as old as the celebrated mammoth frozen up in the Siberian mud. On 5th July, however, those who contended that the tracks were practically fossil were confounded by the appearance of three musk oxen on a hill-top beyond the north ravine. Their discoverer instantly sent off