“As I sat motionless I saw that she stood on the ground beside me, her nose quite on a level with my face.  She came and smelled me over as if uncertain.  Then she took a walk all round me.  One of the cubs put his long thin snout into the pocket of my fur coat, and nuzzled delightedly among the crumbs.  His mother gave him a cuff with her paw which knocked him sprawling three or four paces.

“Having finished her own survey, the bear-mother called away her offspring.  The young bear which had first taken the liberty of search, waited till his mother was a few steps off, and then came slyly round and sunk his nose deep in the corresponding pocket on the other side.  It was a false move and showed bad judgment.  A fish-hook attached itself sharply to his nostril, and he withdrew his head with a howl of pain.  The mother turned with an impatient grunt, and I gave myself up for lost.  She came back at a great stretching gallop, to where the cub was lying on the snow pawing at his nose.  His mother, having turned him over two or three times as if he were a bag of wool, and finding nothing wrong, concluded that he had been stung by a gadfly, or that he was making a fuss about nothing, paying no attention to me whatever.  Having finished her inspection, she cuffed him well for his pains, as a troublesome youngster, and disappeared over the tundra.  I sat there for the matter of an hour, not daring to move lest the lady-bruin might return.  Then fearfully and cautiously I found my way back to the boat and my companions.

“Our voyage after this was quiet and uneventful.  Siberia is like no other country in the world, except the great Arctic plains which fence in the Pole on the American side.  The very loneliness and vastness of the horizon, like the changeless plain of the sea, envelop you.  As soon as you are off the main roads, wide, untrodden, untouched, virgin space swallows you up.

“Specially were we safe in that we had chosen to go to the north.  Had we fled to the east, we should have been pursued by swift horses; to the west, the telegraph would have stopped us; to the south, the Altai and Himalaya, to say nothing of three thousand miles, barred our way.  But no escape had ever been made to the north, and, so far as we knew, no attempt.

“One evening, while I was rowing, bending a back far too weary to be conscious of any additional fatigue, Leof, who happened to be resting, cried out suddenly, ‘The Arctic Ocean!’ And there, blue and clear, through the narrow entrance of a channel half-filled with drift-ice, lay the mysterious ocean of which we had thought so long.  The wind had been due from the north, and therefore in our teeth, so that not till now had we had any chance of sailing.  Now, however, we rigged a sail, and, passing over the bar, we felt for the first time the lift of the waves of the Polar Sea.