ZOOLOGICAL 
SOCIETY BULLETIN 
Number 43 
Published by the New York Zoological Society 
January, 1911 
THE CAPTURE OF “SILVER KING.” 
By Pau J. Ratney. 
O many of my friends have asked me how 
the large polar bears were captured that I 
brought back from my recent hunting expe- 
dition in the arctic regions and presented to the 
New York Zoological Society, I am tempted to 
gratify a desire that is perfectly natural. 
On Saturday, July 30, at three o’clock in the 
morning, in one of the small bays of Ellesmere- 
land, about the 77th parallel, we sighted a large 
bear on the ice, a mile or two ahead. He stood 
on the very edge of an enormous pan of ice 
which extended some two miles back to the shore. 
The lofty mountains of the mainland, furrowed 
with enormous glaciers, made a beautiful back- 
ground, and the cold midnight sun, together 
with the arctic calm, completed a picture that 
any man would remember to his dying day. 
The bear stood with his long neck thrust well 
forward, trying to get our scent. Probably he 
never had seen man before. We headed almost 
straight for him, and when the ship hit the ice 
a hundred yards to his left, he took to the water 
like a duck. 
One of the most remarkable things about a 
polar bear is his cleverness in diving from a 
pan-ice. The most difficult dive for an expert 
swimmer to make is from something almost at 
a level with the water. The bear makes a more 
beautiful dive than I have ever seen made by a 
human swimmer, and when he glides into the 
water, he leaves hardly a ripple behind him. 
They cannot stay under water very long, how- 
ever, as we found when pursuing them with the 
launches. 
SS 
HE STOOD ON THE EDGE OF AN ENORMOUS ICE PAN. 
