NATURAL DEATH IN THE ANIMAL WORLD 153 



like the hyaena may destroy the largest bones. But 

 there is one region in which we should expect to find 

 the bodies of such animals as have died a natural death, 

 along the whole length of the frozen rim of the Old 

 World, from the Petchora to Behring Sea, a region 

 where even the fruits forced into being by the Arctic 

 summer are preserved fresh beneath the snow until the 

 ensuing spring, and the remains of prehistoric beasts, 

 the mammoth and Siberian rhinoceros, have only under- 

 gone partial decay in the frozen soil. Here we should 

 also expect to discover the bodies of animals which had 

 died at the end of the summer c cold-stored ' till the 

 snow broke up in the Arctic spring. 



For this life during the Arctic summer is numbered 

 by millions ; there is probably no such gathering of 

 birds on any part of the globe as on the Arctic tundra 

 in July and August, while large and small mammals, 

 seals, walrus, reindeer, foxes, and lemmings also abound. 

 Do they never die, or what becomes of their bodies ? 

 For the latter are almost never seen. Nordenskiold, in 

 his ' Voyage of the Vega* more than once recurs to this 

 strange absence of the animal dead. In an ice-beset 

 channel among some Arctic islands off the mouth of 

 the Yenesei he saw a great number of dead fish Gadus 

 polar is and next day saw the sea-bottom, where the 

 water was very clear, bestrewn with { innumerable fish ' 

 of the same species, which had probably met their death 



