Too often the drivers are armed with guns and rifles, and I have vivid recollections of spending an animated twenty minutes lying flat on my stomach with Remington rifle-bullets whistling overhead, and an excitable brother sportsman dancing to and fro with a double-barrelled rifle at full cock, jumping to fire at the first thing that stirred. I prefer less excitement, and less motion in the play. There is another method of hunting the bear, when he has hibernated in the den he has found during the autumn, carefully composed of moss and dry leaves, under some rock or tree root. This style of hunting I have not seen, but the Earl of Kilmorey has kindly forwarded me an account of it. As I said before, bears are excessively fond of berries, and nothing is more amusing than to come up to a bear which has made a really good meal, and having over-eaten himself with berries has been attacked by subsequent stomach-ache. His complaints, moans, and attitudes are so human as to be irresistibly ludicrous.
When I first went to Russian Lapland I walked many miles in the sun-lit nights of summer, tracking, or endeavouring to track, bear, and I have also waited by calves and lambs tied up, but all without result; yet I have invariably been successful when I have found any quantity of angelica in a suitable country, and have watched it with glasses from a distance.
On August 1, 1873, my wife and I started from Pechinka Fiord with a fjeld Lapp, and rowed up a little river which runs into it till we could not use our oars; we then landed and _tracked_ the boat as far as possible, and finally carried her bodily half a mile through the forest of birch, carpeted with quantities of yellow globe flowers, wild geraniums, red campion, and other flowers, to a large sheet of water, called by the Lapps St. Trefan’s Lake. We pulled right up this lake to the extreme end (about seven or eight miles), trolling for trout on our way. To keep out in the lake as we did, in a small boat composed of four planks and a bottom sewn together with reindeer thongs, was, as I afterwards found out, an extremely risky experiment; for on a subsequent occasion, while crossing in the same boat, we were caught in the middle of the lake by a thunderstorm, accompanied by very heavy squalls of wind, which soon raised such waves in the fresh water that we had to bear up and run before it, the Lapp pulling all he knew, and my own strength being fully exercised with the steering oar to keep her dead before the wind, as the slightest coming to on either side must have inevitably ended in a capsize--no joke with a lady in the boat, in the icy waters of a lake 3° north of the Arctic Circle. However, I kept her straight until near the shore, which was rocky, when, seeing the water had shoaled, and that if we ran on at the pace we were going we must inevitably smash the boat, I caught hold of my rifle, sang out to everybody to look out, and turned her broadside on about six yards from the shore. We were swamped at once, but in water not much above our knees, so that we managed to catch hold of the boat, and carried her safely out.