WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 277 



survives. As these yellow pieces of ice are few and far 

 between, and as there are far more pieces of blue ice, and 

 as the predominating colour of the snow is white, I'd have 

 painted the bear blue and white if I had been Nature, 

 with only a touch perhaps of yellow here and there. 



Naturalists have also told me that whilst waiting for a 

 seal at its breathing-hole in the ice, the bear covers its nose 

 with its paws to prevent the seal seeing the conspicuous 

 black of its nostrils. I should think myself this is to keep 

 his hands warm. Five black claws on each foot must be as 

 conspicuous to the seal as the black nose. Again, some- 

 times a bear covers itself completely with snow, all but its 

 nose ! This allows man in his turn to have a chance of 

 proving himself to be the fittest. A case in point was when 

 two men I know up here encountered a bear. It took 

 careful stock of them and did not like their protective smell 

 or the checks of their tweeds, so it did not immediately 

 attempt to eat them (possibly it was not hungry), but it 

 retired, as it thought, out of sight, and with a few grand 

 sweeps of its great forearms and hands covered itself up with 

 snow, only leaving its black nose exposed. But for this 

 wonderful foresight on the part of Nature in making the 

 bear's nose black, the order of evolution might have been 

 reversed. Man strolling along and seeing nothing but white 

 snow might have slipped out of existence in the warm em- 

 brace of Ursus Maritimus. The protective coloration of the 

 black nose, from the man's point of view, surely proved 

 that Nature originally intended the bear to be cooked with 

 onions for our dinner. 



When they spotted the black nose, the two men proceeded 

 to guess in which direction lay the neck and body. (I think 

 only an artist who has studied the drawing of a bear's nose 

 and head could have told for certain.) So when they did 

 hit it in the neck, it must have been rather a fluke ! It was 

 a fighting bear, and came out of the eruption of snow with 

 fearful roars, and in a great hurry, for a bear. But Nature 

 insisted on the evolution and survival of the higher species 

 and wiped out the bear with two 475 decimal bullets, nickel 

 covered, and added, very incidentally, vermilion to the 



