stefansson-wrangel-09-29-035

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long period but a cold breeze arose, keeping the seals down in the water."

From this time on the spring and summer was enlivened by great
numbers of birds of various sorts. Seals, too, were basking on top of the ice
in every direction from camp nearly every day, and the party began to practice
what the Eskimos call the "crawling method" of hunting. This is simple in
theory but a little difficult in practice and requires unlimited patience.
Patience, indeed, is the chief qualification. That is the probable explanation
of why Maurer soon developed into an excellent "crawling" hunter and remained the
best of the four at that method of sealing. There seems to have been little
difference between the four hunters in their success with polar bears.

Essentially,the crawling method of sealing depends on the assumption
that you cannot get within range of a basking seal without his seeing [xxx] 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 purpose 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 four or four five hundred yards. The seal on first climbing crawl-
ing out on the ice spends anything from a few minutes 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 horizon for
from five to ten or twenty seconds and then drops to sleep again, perhaps for
fifteen seconds, perhaps for a minute.

The hunter crawls ahead while the seal is sleeping and stops