OCR Text |
Show NO SPORT IN HUNTING SEAL Gathering In of the Helpless Creature Simply Evolves Itself Into a Merciless Slaughter. Hunting the seal from the Icy, storm-swept coast of Newfoundland Is not sport; It Is toll, whereby la part the Newfoundlander wins his scanty measure of bread, says Spare Moments. The hunt is a dull and hideous hid-eous slaughter, scurrying pack and the swinging and thrust of an iron-shod iron-shod gaff, a merciless raining of blows, with a silent waste of Ice all splashed with red at the end of It There is no sport in tills, nor is there any fear of hurt, for the seal pleads and whines like a child, even while the gaff Is falling; but the chase Is beset with multitudinous and unfore-' shadowed perils. The wind gathers the Ice Into floes and jams it up against the coast, an immeasurable. Jagged expanse of It Interspersed with plains ; then the Newfoundlander takes his food and his goggles, and sets out from his little harbor, start- ing at midnight that he may come up with the pack at dawn. But the wind which sweeps the Ice in Inevitably sweeps It out again without warning in an hour, or a day or a week ; nor does it pause to consider the situation of the men who are 20 miles off shore. It veers and freshens and drives the whole mass, grinding and heaving, far out to sea, where it disperses it into its separate fragments. The lives of the hunters depend upon up-on the watchfulness of the attenuated line of lookouts, from the women on the headland to the first sentinel within with-in signaling distance. |