# They Who Walk in the Wilds/The King of the Floes

So much to be done, so few brief weeks to do it in, that the ardent arctic summer was working overtime. The long, long months of sunless night and unimaginable cold were to be undone—the months of black and shrieking storm, of intolerable winds death-cold from the voids of space, of intolerable stillness when the ghost-lights danced low above the endless, naked ice and death of the Roof-of-the-world. The sun, in haste to console after his long forgetfulness, was circling in the sky throughout the whole twenty-four hours, never quite disappearing below the hazy pink horizon. Under the unremitting pour of his eager beams, icy pinnacles cracked and crumbled; deep fissures of ineffable sapphire opened in the icewalls of eternal glacier, and ran with sharp reports along the tumbled fields of the floe. Here and there appeared wide patches of green and dancing water, with narrow lanes leading out to the open sea, where it chafed incessantly at its shrinking boundaries.
Shoreward, low ridges, and raw, jagged teeth of rock, black and slate-blue and rust-red, came ​into view above the limitless white desolation. Along the southerly bases of the rocks, and in every sunward-facing, sheltered hollow, where the harsh soil was bare of snow and thawed and warmed to a depth of two or three inches over its foundations of impregnable frost, a film of light but vivid green was springing into hurried life, and already starred thick with tiny blooms, pink, yellow, and ethereal lavender, all in haste to fertilize and be fertilized, and to ripen their precious seeds and drop them back into the mould, ere the night of cold should again close down upon them. Amid the blooms bustled innumerable tiny flies and gleaming beetles, with here and there a flickering mite of a butterfly, paper-white or pallid mauve. Over the faces of the rocks were spreading stains and smudges of pinkish grey and dull greenish yellow, where the newborn lichens were reproducing themselves in the fecundating radiance. The still air was faintly musical with the babble of innumerable rills.
At one point, through some whim of tide and current, the ice-floe had drawn quite clear of the shore, leaving some three hundred yards of beach un-covered. It was a beach ribbed with ice-ground ridges of purple-black rock, which now, at low tide, held a miscellaneous drift of weeds and disrooted mussels and stranded crustaceans in their shallow intervening pools.
​From behind a jutting shoulder of black-and-purple rock came, suddenly and silently, a long, slouching, terrifying figure, the great white bear of the arctic. His narrow, low-browed snaky head and black-tipped muzzle were stretched out straight before him and his nostrils quivered as he sniffed the clear air for the taint of anything that might ease his mighty appetite. Living prey he did not expect, at the moment, or the terror of the North would not have shown his dread shape so openly upon that naked stretch of sunlit shore. But for nearly an hour, with the patience of all great hunters, he had lain hidden and motionless among the rocks, hoping that the seals, his favourite quarry, might be tempted shoreward to bask in this sheltered cove. Balked of this hope, he wandered down the beach to see what gleanings from the harvest of the tides might be gathered in the rock-pools.
A few mussels and whelks he had already scooped up and crunched greedily; a glutinous, musky-flavoured squid he had gulped down with relish, when he came upon a prize worth his quest. It was a big rock-cod, lodged, white-belly upward, in a fissure of the ledge. He clawed it forth and turned it over exultantly. It was fresh-killed—a great mouthful bitten cleanly out of the thick of the back.
Hastily bolting the fish, this wary hunter shrank ​down flat upon his belly, making himself as small and inconspicuous as possible, and scanned the sea beyond the ice with savage, hopeful eyes. He knew at once that that bite was the work of a seal, of a seal killing eagerly, this way and that, among swarming victims, without stopping to gather in the booty.
That seal and his fellows, their hunger glutted, might presently come out upon the floe to bask and doze in the sunshine.
Soundlessly as a cloud-shadow, and almost as unnoticeably, the bear twisted and crawled his way out to the edge of the bright floe, and flattened himself down between two hummocks. As soon as he was motionless, he seemed to melt from view, so perfectly did he match himself to his surroundings. The keenest, most suspicious eye would have had to look twice or thrice before detecting, among the greyish and yellowish blurs upon the shadowy whiteness, the outlines of that sinister form and snaky, black-snouted head. The point of blackness, instead of betraying its owner, had the effect of making his faint outlines less conspicuous and diverting the eye from them. Here he lay rigid as if frozen into the ice, hoping that one of the expected seals would emerge close before him, within reach of the lightning stroke of his armed paw. If not, then he would wait till the seals had floundered out upon the floe, inter​cept their retreat, and probably secure at least one victim before they could get back to their refuge in the water.
The bear had lain there in tense expectancy for perhaps a dozen minutes when suddenly, just beneath his nose, the grey-green sea surged heavily. A huge, glistening, rusty black head shot upward, almost in the watcher's face; and he found himself confronted by the hideous, tusked and whiskered mask of a gigantic bull-walrus.
The two massive yellow tusks growing downward from the mighty upper jaw of the walrus were over two feet in length, straight, gleaming, and tapered to a fine point. The long, stiff whiskers standing out on each side of the muzzle were thick as porcupine quills. The small, steady eyes, set deep in the low-crowned skull, flamed into sudden rage as they found themselves staring into the fierce eyes of the bear.
For some seconds the two great beasts, thus brought so startlingly face to face, eyed each other unwaveringly without a movement on either side. The bear, in the first wrath of his disappointment, itched to slash across that grotesque and defiant mask with his rending paws. But his sagacity, well trained in the harsh struggle of arctic life, restrained him. Presently he shifted his gaze for a swift instant, and noted that the surface of the sea all about the edge of the floe was dotted with ​other dark and glistening whiskered heads, most of them tusked like that of the bull before him. He knew that the tuskless heads were those of the fat young calves. The walrus herd was coming ashore. He reflected that, secure in their strength and their numbers, they might grow careless in the lazy sunshine, and then, if they thought he had gone away, one of those calves might possibly stray within his reach. In any case, he had nothing to gain but discomfiture if he should remain to try conclusions with the giant walrus—who at this moment seemed quite ready for the adventure.
With a throaty snarl the bear arose to his full height, turned his furry rump contemptuously upon his rival, and stalked off to the beach to disappear among the rocks, as if acknowledging that it was useless for him to try to hunt walrus. Immediately the bull heaved his enormous, warty carcass higher from the water, hooked his tusks over the solid edge of the floe, and with a loud grunt, drew himself forth upon the ice, where he lay sprawling complacently, to watch the foe's retreat. In five minutes or so, the whole herd, following with confidence their invincible leader, had lumbered forth upon the floe with noisy splashings and gruntings, and were basking their uncouth bulks in the genial glow.
Counting himself, and not without reason, King of the Floes, Ah-wook, the giant walrus, in the ​complacency of his self-trust forgot all about the great white bear as soon as that crafty marauder had vanished from his sight. And the whole herd forgot with him. The only foe whom Ah-wook had learned to fear was man—represented by the Eskimo, with his swift kayak and deadly swift harpoon. For months there had been no sign of man in all that region. It was a fitting time, when the arctic sun burned so benignly, for the King of the Floes to relax his vigilance.
With ponderous floppings and gruntings, the herd scattered all over the ice. Their rough and oily-black hides, almost bursting with fatness, glistened in the sunlight. The unwieldy cows, tusked like the bulls and almost as ferocious-looking (but the tenderest and most devoted of mothers), sprawled happily as they nursed their ever-greedy calves. These latter, many of them almost as big as their mothers, but as yet without tusks, were as grotesquely unlovely as the offspring of such monstrous parents might be expected to be. As a rule, there is some charm or grace or winsomeness to be found in the younglings of even the clumsiest and ugliest of the wild kindreds. But the baby walrus can only be accounted a gross caricature of babyhood.
It chanced that one young cow, less wary and more adventurous than her companions, was smitten with a whim to try basking on the dry, ​grey, sun-warmed ledges of the beach instead of on the ice. With her half-grown calf floundering anxiously at her side, she slipped off the floe, and with gusty snortings worked her way some twenty or thirty paces up the shore till she gained a flat ledge which was precisely to her liking. Settling herself complacently,—for never before had she experienced so warm a couch,—she turned and called to the calf, which, finding the rocks uncomfortable to travel over, had dropped a few yards behind. The fat and flabby youngster squealed protestingly, as if to say he was coming as fast as he could; and then, seized with sudden fear of the strange element upon which he found himself, he stopped, and looked back longingly at the safe water and the familiar ice.
At this moment, from behind the nearest shoulder of rock a huge white shape burst forth, launched itself, with a clatter of iron claws on ledge and gravel, across the open, and fell upon the unhappy calf. One blow of the terrific mailed paw (which looked so furry soft) smashed the youngster's neck, and it collapsed, quivering like an enormous mass of dark-brown jelly. In the same second the bear seized it by the head and with frantic haste started to drag the prize away to some safe refuge among the rocks—for well he knew the devotion and the blind fury of the walrus mother.
​In spite of the great bulk of the carcass—little short of half a ton in weight—the bear handled it almost as a fox would have handled an extra-fat hare. But for all his agility and his tremendous strength, he was not quite quick enough to get away with the prize. With a bellowing scream of grief and rage, the mother hurled herself downward from her ledge, rearing and plunging over the rocks at such speed that the slaughterer was overtaken before he had gained a score of yards. With an angry growl! he dropped his booty and sprang aside just in time to escape such a blow from those pile-driving tusks as would have brought his career to a gory end. Circling nimbly, as the mother came down upon her flippers at the end of her plunge and paused half covering the body of her young, he dashed in and sprang upon her back, tearing savagely with his murderous claws.
But the cow's hide was too tough, the padding of blubber beneath it too thick, for either his claws or his teeth to make much impression upon it. He tore a couple of hideous red gashes, indeed; but to the maddened cow they were mere surface wounds, of as little consequence as a bloody nose to a fighting schoolboy. She reared her monstrous shoulders again and shook off her adversary, at the same time swinging about with such lightning speed that she caught him a glancing stroke upon ​The King of the Floes 6r the rump with one tusk as he scurried out of reach. Slight enough it seemed, that blow, but it tore away fur and hide, and from its effects the bear was to go limping for weeks thereafter.
Recognizing himself overmatched, but seeing that the cow was too engrossed with her dead to attempt the vain task of pursuing him, the bear sat down on his haunches and surveyed the situation in a cold fury, his jaws slavering red foam, his splendid white coat dishevelled and plastered with blood. What he saw was enough to daunt the stoutest heart that ever throbbed beneath a furry hide. The giant Ah-wook, grunting his wrath, was just floundering up from the lip of the floe; and on either side of him a line of bulls and cows only less monstrous than their chief, their whiskers bristling, their vengeful tusks gleaming and lunging as the dreadful array wallowed forward. With rather more haste than consisted with his dignity the bear made off, limping, and climbed to a ridge where he knew no walrus could ever follow him. There, well hidden, he lay down to lick his wound and to watch what his foes might do.
Seeing their enemy thus routed, the angry herd calmed down, and presently turned back to their basking on the floe. But Ah-wook came straight till he reached the side of the bereaved cow. To ​his practised eye it was plain at once that the calf was dead, and this knowledge he somehow conveyed to the mother. But she paid no heed to him. She was determined to get her young, dead or alive, back to the kind, familiar shelter of the sea. Hooking her tusks beneath the lax bulk, she lifted and dragged it clumsily till she had got it half-way down the slope. Then it fell into a deep crevice and jammed itself there in such a way that she could get no hold or purchase upon it. Ah-wook, though he kept close to her side protectingly, made no attempt to help her. The youngster was dead, and therefore of no more consequence in his eyes. At last, in despair, the mother gave up, and made off sullenly towards the floe; and Ah-wook followed close behind her, from time to time pausing to look back and glare defiance at the lonely line of rocks.
As he watched his invincible adversaries depart, leaving his victim behind them, the bear licked his lips in satisfaction and contempt. He was going to win, after all. But he was in no hurry. He would let the stupid sea-beasts forget their anger before he would descend to reclaim the booty. He knew the walrus were great feeders. They would soon grow hungry, and would betake themselves again to the sea to grub for their coarse provender on the muddy bottom of the bay. He himself was hungry, to be sure; but his appetite had ​already waited some time, and could afford to wait a little longer.
As he lay there in the sun, nursing his well-founded anticipations, and disturbed only by the ache in his wounded haunch, he caught sight of a pair of little blue arctic foxes stealthily creeping forth upon the beach. Their fine noses wrinkled and sniffed hungrily as they caught the taint of fresh blood upon the air. Presently they located the body of the dead walrus calf wedged in its crevice.
To the cunning little prowlers such a find was almost too good to be true. It aroused their suspicions. Surely there was a catch in it somewhere. They crept forward with the utmost caution, glancing about them at every noiseless step, and taking advantage of every cranny or boulder to conceal their advance.
At first glimpse of the small intruders the bear had given vent to a low growl of annoyance. The tiny beasts, of course, could make no serious impression on that vast bulk of flesh. They could do no more than gnaw away some fragments of the tough hide. But like all the hunting beasts, the bear was very jealous of his kill, and hated to have any other creature, however humble, sample the feast before he himself had had a chance to satisfy his appetite. He restrained himself, however, till the foremost of the two foxes was ​within a foot or two of the body. Then suddenly he leaned forth head and shoulders from his hiding-place, and uttered a short, strident snarl of menace.
The foxes cast one look upon the dreadful, grinning mask that glared down upon them from the ridge, then scurried off respectfully. But as soon as they felt themselves safely out of sight, they halted, circled about and crept to a place of concealment in the very crest of the ridge, whence they could command a clear view of the bear's subsequent actions. They considered, not unreasonably, that there should be some substantial remnants to be picked up after his banquet.
The bear, meanwhile, was growing impatient. The pain of his wound was not improving his temper. But the walrus herd still basked com—placently on the ice, in full view; and their colossal leader, keeping his post on the landward edge of the floe, appeared dangerously alert and watchful. The hungry bear felt that there was nothing to do but continue the dull game of waiting.
How much longer his prudence might have kept curb upon his appetite it would be hard to say; but now an unforeseen factor came into the problem. Though the vast northern solitudes seem so empty, they are nevertheless secretly populous, teeming with furtive life; and news of any considerable killing—which must mean food for some ​one—travels mysteriously. The wandering airs make haste to carry it, and none who receives the tidings is left indifferent.
A pack of half a dozen arctic wolves, long-jawed and ravenous, emerged from a deep ravine which cleft the ridge, and trotted boldly forth upon the beach, sniffing interrogatively. Straightway they spotted the rich prize there in plain view, jammed in the crevice. And straightway, disdaining craft or investigation, confident in their ferocity and their speed, they swept down upon it at full gallop.
For the patient watcher on the ridge this was too much. With a roar of indignation he projected himself down the slope like an avalanche, and reached the body of the young walrus some ten paces ahead of the wolves. Standing over it on three legs, he turned, with fangs bared and one paw uplifted, and faced the pack with a low snarl of warning.
The wolves, well knowirig the power of that terrific paw, halted abruptly. The leader sat upon his haunches, with his tongue hanging out, and blinked sagaciously. The rest of the pack divided, two to one side and three to the other, and encircled their huge antagonist, their eyes glinting green, and their jaws slavering. Keeping just at a safe distance of a dozen feet, or so, they uttered never a sound; and the bear, too, stopped ​his snarling, and waited. He felt pretty confident that, bold though they were, they would not dare to close with him; but he was taking no risks.
And out on the floe, not fifty paces away, the walrus lifted their tusked and whiskered heads and stared with lazy curiosity. Ah-wook, indeed, went so far as to flounder to the very edge of the floe, half minded to take a hand in the affair and see those puny l-and-beasts scatter before his onset. He feared neither bear nor wolves. But he was so secure in his strength and in the armour of his massive hide that it hardly seemed worth his while to score so cheap a triumph. In the end his indolence conquered, and he was content to watch the drama.
It was the bear, at length, who decided to force the issue. Suddenly, like a coiled spring let loose, he hurled himself at the leader of the pack, who leaped aside like a hare, just in time to save himself. At the same instant two of the other wolves dashed in and snapped at the bear's hindquarters. The bear, however, had anticipated this very move, and his charge upon the leader had been merely a feint. Doubling back just as his rash assailants reached him, he caught one of them full on the side, ripping him open and hurling him twenty feet away. The rest of the pack, to whom nothing in the way of meat came amiss, promptly fell upon the corpse, and devoured it; and the ​bear, happy to see them so well occupied, made haste to take the edge off his own hunger. Then he proceeded laboriously to drag the carcass up among the rocks, where he could conclude his meal more comfortably.
And the wolves, grown less ravenous and more discreet, followed him at a prudent distance, remembering that when he had well gorged himself, he would go away somewhere to sleep, leaving them to feast at their ease.
About this time, though the sun shone as benignantly as ever, a certain restlessness began to show itself in the basking herd of walrus. As if with one simultaneous impulse, they all began to grunt, swaying upon their flippers. Ah-wook forthwith forgot his lazy interest in the great white bear and the wolves. Whirling his gigantic bulk about, he floundered through the herd to the farther edge of the floe, and plunged, with a resounding splash, into the quiet green sea. In hot haste the whole herd followed him. For perhaps a minute the still air was loud with the heavy splashings. Then every dark form vanished, while the water heaved and creamed along the edges of the ice. The feeding-time of the walrus had arrived.
This little bay, as I have said, was comparatively shallow, and its bottom, for the most part, of rich deep mud, ribbed with flat ledges which the ​tide-wash kept scoured. It was a fruitful breeding place for huge, coarse clams and mussels, and innumerable crustaceans large and small. In fact, it was swarming with shoal-water life, and hence was an ideal pasturage for the herds of the walrus. Scattered all over the teeming bottom, the hungry monsters grubbed up the mud with their tusks, or with the same efficient weapons raked the rockloving shellfish from the ledges, rarely troubling to crush the hard morsels between their irresistible jaws, but preferring to gulp them down whole, shell and all. And if they swallowed quantities of mud and small stones at the same time, that did not trouble either their undiscriminating palates or their incomparably hardy stomachs. Above them, as they fed, the sunlight glimmered down greenly through the tranquil tide; and the silver-bellied cod and hake and pollock, singly or in shoals, darted hither and thither in confusion, while the fat and sluggish flat-fish—plaice and flounder and fluke—disturbed in their feeding on the mud, flounced up indignantly and glided off to serener pasturage.
Suddenly among the bewildered shoals of cod and pollock appeared a gleaming and terrible shape before which they all scattered like plover before a goshawk. Some sixteen or seventeen feet in length, slender and sinister, and with a keen lance about two feet long standing straight ​out from its pointed nose, it came soundlessly and with appalling swiftness from out of the great deeps. It paid no attention to the panic-stricken fish. It hung poised for a second or two above the unsuspecting walrus herd, staring down upon them with round, blazing eyes as hard as glass. Then, having selected as the most manageable prey a very young calf which clung close to the mother's side as she nosed in the mud, it gave one screwlike sweep of its mighty tail, shot downward, and drove its sword clean through the youngling's tender body, cleaving its heart.
Ordinarily, the tactics of the giant swordfish would have been to bear away the victim on his sword, to be stabbed to fragments and devoured comfortably at a distance from the herd. But in this case, the fatal thrust having been delivered from above, the prize was not impaled in such a position as to be carried off conveniently. The slayer, therefore, withdrew his weapon, backed away a few yards at a lower level, and with a short but irresistible rush transfixed the prize once more, this time through the flank, in the same movement lifting it several feet clear of the bottom.
The outraged mother, bewildered for a moment, now reared herself directly in the slayer's path, frantic and dangerous. The great fish, his sword burdened and useless, was compelled to back away ​and change his course. And at this instant Ah-wook, as nimble in the water as a seal, took a hand in the murderous game. His presence, close at hand, had been ignored by the overconfident swordfish, who expected no interference except from the mother of his victim. As he swerved aside, somewhat heavily by reason of the burden upon his sword, a colossal black bulk suddenly overshadowed him, and two long tusks, piercing him through the middle of the back, crushed him down irresistibly upon the bottom.
Although the great swordfish was a good four hundred pounds of corded muscle and galvanic nervous energy, he was no match for the mighty bull walrus, whose weight was over a ton and whose cunning far outclassed his own. Nevertheless his gigantic convulsions, and the paroxysmal lashings of his tremendous tail, enabled him to bear his captor along, hither and thither among the astonished herd, plowing deep furrows in the mud. But not all his frantic writhings could shake loose the grip of those inexorable tusks or lighten the crushing, suffocating pressure upon his back. And all the time Ah-wook—who nursed a special grudge against the swordfish tribe by reason of a gnarled and ancient scar along his flank—kept boring down inexorably with all his weight, and rending and grinding within the body of his adversary. The mud was churned up, and the green ​tide, for fathoms all about the titanic contest, boiled to the surface, brown and frothy and bloodstreaked.
Then on a sudden, his backbone wrenched apart, the swordfish ceased to struggle and lay limp.
For a few seconds more Ah-wook continued to shake him as a terrier shakes a rat, jerking the body about savagely as if to glut his vengea ice to the full. Then, his labouring lungs warning him that it was time to take breath, he withdrew his tusks and shot up to the surface. Here he lay floating for a minute or two, deeply drinking in the vital air; and presently the water all about him was dotted with the staring heads of his followers. Next, floating belly upward, appeared the long, mangled body of the swordfish, the calf still firmly impaled upon its sword. Ah-wook grunted scornfully at the sight, raised himself high in the water to glare about him as if in challenge to other adversaries, and at length led the way in triumph back to the floe, confirmed in his kingship both by sea and by land.