THE WOLVERINE. 495 



to suck the blood of the flying victim till it falls down 

 exhausted with pain and fatigue. When the Glutton has 

 captured a large animal, he hides the carcass, after having 

 satisfied his present hunger, in the cleft of a rock or in a 

 thick brake, carefully covered with moss if in an exposed 

 place. Even the upper part of a tree serves him for a 

 larder, so that the Fox may not have access to the good 

 things." 



Bingley, in 1870, spoke of the Glutton in a similar 

 strain: "We are informed that they climb into trees in the 

 neighborhood of herds of Deer, and carry along with them 

 a considerable quantity of a kind of moss to which the Deer 

 are partial. As soon as any of the herd happens to 

 approach the tree, the Glutton throws down the moss. If 

 the Deer stops to eat, the Glutton instantly darts upon its 

 back, and, after fixing himself firmly between the horns, 

 tears out its eyes, which torments the animal to such a 

 degree that, either to end its torments or to get rid of its 

 cruel enemy, it strikes its head against the trees till it falls 

 down dead." 



Pontoppidan, while correcting a belief of his time as to 

 the Wolverine being the third cub of a Bear, tells us this: 

 "A friend of mine, a man of probity, has assured me, from 

 ocular demonstration, that when the Glutton is caught alive 

 (which seldom happens), and is chained to a stone wall, his 

 hunger does not decline the stones and mortar, but he will 



eat himself into the wall By the practice of 



squeezing between two trees, he exonerates his stomach, 

 which has not time to digest what he has so voraciously 

 devoured." 



Bingley gives a good description of the Wolverine. He 

 had evidently received trustworthy information from Brit- 

 ish American sources, though seemingly he did not suspect 

 the Wolverine and Glutton to be identical. His statement, 

 on information, relating to a Wolverine which upset the 

 greater part of a wood-pile, more than seventy yards in cir- 

 cumference, to get at some provisions hidden in the center, 

 is generally considered too heavy for discussion, though I 



