e appearance of
a dish of carefully-shelled oysters. In collecting its food the
walrus probably uses its long tusks to dig up the mussels and worms
which are deeply concealed in the clay.[78] Scoresby states that in
the stomach of a walrus he found, along with small crabs, pieces of
a young seal.

The largest walrus tusks I have seen were two of a male walrus
purchased in the summer of 1879 at St. Lawrence Island, in the north
part of Behring's Sea. They measured 830 and 825 millimetres in
length, their largest circumference was 227 and 230 millimetres, and
they weighed together 6,680 gram. I have seen the tusks of females
of nearly the same length, but they are distinguished from those of
the male by being much more slender. The surface of the tusks is
always full of cracks, but under it there is a layer of ivory free
of cracks, which again incloses a grained kernel of bone which at
some places is semi-transparent, as if drenched with oil.

When the walrus ox gets very old, he swims about by himself as a
solitary individual, but otherwise animals of the same age and sex keep
together in large herds. The young walrus long follows its mother, and
is protected by her with evident fondness and very conspicuous maternal
affection. Her first care, when she is pursued, is accordingly to save
her young even at the sacrifice of her own life. A female walrus with
young is nearly always lost, if they be discovered from a hunting boat.
However eagerly she may try by blows and cuffs to get her young under
water or lead her pursuers astray by diving with it under her forepaw,
she is generally overtaken and killed. Such a hunt is truly grim, but
the walrus-hunter knows no mercy in following his occupation. The
walrus, especially the old solitary male, sleeps and rests during
autumn, when the drift-ice has disappeared, also in the water, with his
head now above the surface, now under it, and with his lungs so strongly
inflated that the body is kept floating, with part of the back
projecting out of the water. The latter way of sleeping is indeed
possible only for so long at once as the animal can keep below, but this
is said to be a very long time. If a hunting boat meets a walrus
sleeping in this way it is first wakened with a loud "strike up" before
it is harpooned, "in order that in its fright it may not knock a hole in
the boat with its tusks." The walrus sinks and is lost, if he is killed
by a shot while in the water, or if he b