DISCOVERY 



181 



The female is, however, compelled to seek shelter 

 sooner on account of her prospective family. The 

 winter den of a black bear is generally a partial 

 excavation under the upturned roots of a fallen 

 tree, or beneath a pile of logs, with perhaps a few 

 bushes and leaves scraped together by way of a 

 bed, while to the first snowstorm is left the task of 

 completing the roof and filling the remaining chinks. 

 Not unfrequently the den is a great hole or cave dug 

 into the side of a knoll, and generally under some 

 standing tree, whose roots serve as side-posts to the 

 entrance. The amount of labour bestowed upon it 

 depends upon the length of time the bear expects to 

 hibernate. If the prospects point towards a severe 

 winter, and there is a scarcity of food, they ' den ' 

 early and take pains to make a comfortable nest ; 

 but when they stay out late, and then ' den ' in a 

 hurry, they do not take the trouble to fix up their 

 nests at all. At such times they simply crawl into 

 any convenient shelter without gathering so much as 

 a blanch of moss to soften their beds. Snow com- 

 pletes the covering, and as their breath condenses and 

 freezes an icy wall begins to form, and increases in 

 thickness and extent day by day till they are soon 

 unable to escape, even if they would, and are obliged 

 to remain in this icy cell till liberated by the sun in 

 April or May." 



Although, in the south the grizzly bear remains active 

 throughout the winter, in the northern part of its 

 range it hibernates. When during the spring it emerges, 

 it has a habit of standing upright against a tree and 

 scoring the bark with its claws. As it usually stands on 

 a base of 4 or 5 feet of hardened snow, the height of 

 its clawings must not be taken as representing the 

 length of the animal, though sportsmen who tell bear 

 stories very often do so. 



But perhaps the best known amongst the hibernating 

 animals are found amongst rodents. Squirrels, as 

 we have indicated above, are but partial hibernators. 

 In temperate climates they retire during the winter 

 into hollows of trees. They bury their stores of nuts, 

 or other food, just beneath the surface of the ground 

 in various caches in the woods, and from time to 

 time awake from their winter sleep to feed 



The chipmunk, as Dr. Merriam tells us, begins to 

 hoard up large stores of food in the autumn, and being 

 the least hardy of the American squirrels, commonly 

 goes into winter-quarters at the beginning of November, 

 not appearing again until the early thaws of February 

 tempt him out. 



The marmots of Europe and Asia also hibernate, 

 the Alpine species making large burrows with a single 

 entrance. The burrows end in a large chamber lined 

 with grass, and here, coiled away from the cold, some 

 ten to fifteen marmots may be found clustered together. 



One of the commonest children's pets in Great 

 Britain is the dormouse, and as readers of Alice in 

 Wonderland will remember, it is a profound sleeper. 

 The dormouse accumulates much fat at the approach 

 of w inter, but a warm day will bring it out to eat some 

 of its accumulated store of fat, acorns, beech-nuts, 

 beech-mast, or corn. 



One more example. A certain little lemur confined 

 to Madagascar retires into torpidity during the 

 southern winter or dry season. Before retirement, 

 however, it accumulates an immense quantity of fat 

 in certain parts of its body, notably in the tail, which 

 recalls the appendage of the well-known fat-tailed 

 sheep of the Cape, or Middle East. By the time the 

 lemur emerges its tail has resumed its normal dimen- 

 sions. 



We have seen there is a certain progressiveness in 

 hibernation : some animals come to life during the 

 winter and feed, others remain immovable for months. 

 But in all, the vital processes are much weakened and 

 diminished. Feeding and movement are at an end, 

 the heart-beat is limp and the breathing imperceptible. 

 In those animals that hibernate most thoroughly, life 

 is sustained by their absorbing their own fat. 



Human Beings 



We have said that one of the attributes of living 

 organisms is that they perform certain actions rhyth- 

 mically at stated periods. One of the most striking 

 of these rhythms is sleep. We have also seen that 

 this sleep, in the case of certain animals, may be not a 

 matter of day and night, but may be prolonged 

 throughout the winter, or in the tropics throughout 

 the summer. There are many cases in human beings 

 where sleep is prolonged into a trance, and for the 

 most part these trances are not within the control of 

 the sleeper. A trance is a sleep-like state which 

 comes spontaneously, and is independent of any 

 poisons, though of course certain poisons produce 

 profound sleep. It is very difficult to arouse a person 

 from a trance. People subject to them are seldom in 

 perfect health. Very often they are slightly hysterical, 

 and in other cases they are anaemic. 



As a rule a trance sets in quite suddenly. There is 

 a case of a girl going into a room by herself and being 

 shortly afterwards found in a state of coma which 

 lasted thirty-eight hours. In another case a young 

 woman went upstairs to change her dress, and was 

 found in a state of trance on her bed which lasted 

 for fourteen days. But the most interesting factor 

 about trances is that sometimes they can be pro- 

 duced at the will of the sufferer. In India, where 

 mystery and magic are very prevalent, it has for a 

 long time been believed that certain holy men called 

 " fakirs," who live a life of privation and often of self- 



