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220

THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

been little difference between the four hunters in their
success with polar bears.

Essentially, the crawling method of sealing de-
pends on the assumption that you cannot get
within range of a basking seal without his seeing you
and that when he does see you your success will have to
depend on your ability to convince him that he is looking
at something which is not dangerous. The easiest,
and practically the only, way of doing that is to
pretend that you yourself are a seal. For that pur-
pose the hunter should be dressed in dark clothing
and should begin crawling snake fashion while he
is still so far away that the seal cannot see him—say
three or four hundred yards. The seal on first climb-
ing out on the ice spends anything from a few min-
utes to an hour in looking about for a possible bear.
When he has made up his mind that no bears are near,
he begins to take naps. But he does not dare to take
long ones. I have frequently timed the waking and
sleeping intervals of seals for hours, and have found that
they seldom sleep as much as a minute and a half and
that the average nap is a good deal less than a minute.
At the end of each nap he lifts his head about twelve
or eighteen inches, makes a complete survey of the hori-
zon for from five to ten or twenty seconds and then drops
to sleep again, perhaps for fifteen seconds, perhaps a
minute.

The hunter crawls ahead while the seal is sleeping
and stops whenever he wakes up. At something over a
hundred yards the seal will see you. He then studies
you carefully for several minutes, occasionally lowering
his head and pretending to sleep, but really watching
intently. During this period you must behave exactly