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Updated: May 1, 2025
Occasionally one of the teams would scent a seal-hole, and away the dogs would rush towards it as hard as they could go, all the other teams following after, pell-mell; and, when they reached the hole, it was all the hunters could do, by whipping and shouting and scolding, to keep the teams from coming atop of each other, and getting into a snarl. Once this happened with two of the teams.
A seal-hole being soon found, we had not long to wait before the seal came into it, with a little puff, as before; and, as soon as the noise was heard, I let fly with my harpoon, and, striking through the snow-crust, hit the seal fairly in the neck, and drove the harpoon into him.
It looked just like a river, only it was frozen solid, and the end of it, where it came into the sea, was broken off like a great wall of ice, and there were cakes of ice floating about in the water. Suddenly there was a cracking sound. Menie had heard that sound before. It was the same sound that he had heard when he went seal-hole hunting and got carried away on the ice raft.
A rope is coiled on the floor of a large hut in such a way as to leave a small opening at the top, which represents the breathing hole of a seal. Two enchanters stand beside it, one of them grasping a spear as if he were watching a seal-hole in winter, the other holding the harpoon-line. A third sorcerer sits at the back of the hut chanting a magic song to lure Sedna to the spot.
"Why, drown him, and if ever he gets over it " replied Pen, with a fearful smile of satisfaction. About two hundred steps from the vessel there was a seal-hole, a kind of circular crevice cut out by the teeth of that amphibious animal, hollowed out from underneath, and through which the seal comes up to breathe on to the surface of the ice.
This man had only watched at the seal-hole a couple of hours, but the natives frequently sit behind their snow walls for the greater part of a day, almost without moving hand or foot. Having witnessed this capture, Annatock drove on until the most of his countrymen were left behind.
When this was thoroughly understood, his hosts ceased to persecute him with regard to displays of his skill. One day, in the dead of the long winter, Cheenbuk proposed to Nazinred to go on a hunt after bears. The latter declined, on the ground that he had already arranged to go with Mangivik to watch at a seal-hole. Cheenbuk therefore resolved to take Anteek with him instead.
Menie knew what the queer noise meant, for his father had told him all about seal hunting. It meant that a seal-hole was near, and that a seal had come up to breathe. It was the seal that made the "plopping" noise. Menie tried to keep the dogs still, but they wouldn't be kept still. They ran round with their noses on the snow, giving little anxious whines, and short, sharp barks.
He never came back to the hole, for it was all frozen over next day, and so it remained. We afterwards discovered that when a seal-hole has been once touched, the seal will never go back to it. "I was now more puzzled than ever to know what to do; but I did not give up trying, determined to succeed, one way or another.
Kotuko the dog ranged far and wide, and in the dead stillness of the ice-fields Kotuko the boy could hear his half-choked whine of excitement, above a seal-hole three miles away, as plainly as though he were at his elbow. This helps to keep a man's legs from twitching as he waits and waits and waits for the quick-eared seal to rise.
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