When we had
looked after the hut, and had got the fire put out, and found leisure
then to go after the bear, he was dead enough, as I said before; but
much of the hair was singed off him as nicely almost, in some places, as
if he had been shaved, so that the skin was of little use to us, and we
only used the flesh, which we soon grew very fond of; for this bear, as
I have said before, was a young one, and his flesh was tender."

"What became of the other bear?" asked William, curious to reach the end
of the bear story.

"We never saw anything more of him, nor heard anything more of him
either," answered the Captain; "and indeed we were never troubled any
more with bears at all in that way, but thereafter lived in peace.

"That is to say, we lived in peace so far as the bears were concerned;
but the cold and the darkness were now at their greatest, and the winds
blew sometimes with such violence that we were often greatly terrified.
Indeed, the storms at one time were so constant and so fearful that we
could scarcely stir out of doors. Up to this period the weather had been
mostly calm and very favorable to our course of life; but, as the winter
began to turn towards the spring, all this was changed.

"Yet we could not but feel thankful for the great privilege of good
weather with which Providence had so far blessed us. Had the storms
raged in the autumn and early winter as they did now, we should have
been quite unable to provide for our wants, and we must have starved.
But now our needs were abundantly supplied, and we had little occasion
for going abroad unless we wanted to and the weather was favorable. Once
only did we experience any serious danger from the weather; and this,
like most evils that befall all human beings, was due to our own
imprudence.

"There being a bright moon, and the air being nearly calm and not
unusually cold, we were tempted to take a long walk; and, attracted by
one object after another that was upon the frozen sea over which we were
walking,--here an iceberg of peculiar formation or remarkable size,
there a snow-drift of singular form,--we found ourselves at last several
miles away from our hut.

"When we turned about at length to retrace our steps, we discovered that
the northern sky, which we now faced (for we had walked out in a
southerly direction), showed stormy symptoms, and very quickly afterward
a severe gale of wind broke over the island and the desolate sea, and we
found ou