Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/451

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some fresh part of their unwieldy bodies to the warmth,—great, ugly, wallowing sea-hogs, they were evidently enjoying themselves, and were without apprehension of approaching danger. We neared them slowly, with muffled oars.

As the distance between us and the game steadily narrowed, we began to realize that we were likely to meet with rather formidable antagonists. Their aspect was forbidding in the extreme, and our sensations were perhaps not unlike those which the young soldier experiences who hears for the first time the order to charge the enemy. We should all, very possibly, have been quite willing to retreat had we dared own it. Their tough, nearly hairless hides, which are about an inch thick, had a singularly iron-plated look about them, peculiarly suggestive of defense; while their huge tusks, which they brandished with an appearance of strength that their awkwardness did not diminish, looked like very formidable weapons of offense if applied to a boat's planking or to the human ribs, if one should happen to find himself floundering in the sea among the thick-skinned brutes. To complete the hideousness of a facial expression which the tusks rendered formidable enough in appearance, Nature had endowed them with broad flat noses, which were covered all over with stiff whiskers, looking much like porcupine quills, and extending up to the edge of a pair of gaping nostrils. The use of these whiskers is as obscure as that of the tusks; though it is probable that the latter may be as well weapons of offense and defense as for the more useful purpose of grubbing up from the bottom of the sea the mollusks which constitute their principal food. There were two old bulls in the herd who appeared