THE BEAR. 
853 
out in open sea ; and here we have them in a region 
some seventy miles from the nearest stable ice. They 
have seldom, or, as far as my readings go, never — if 
we except Parry's Spitzhergen experience — been seen 
so far from land. In the great majority of cases, they 
seem to have been accidentally caught and carried 
adrift on disengaged ice-floes. In this way they travel 
to Iceland; and it may have been so perhaps with 
the Spitzhergen instances. Others have been reported 
thirty miles from shore in this bay. I myself noticed 
them fifty miles from the Greenland coast last July. 
" There is something very grand about this tawny 
savage ; never leaving this utter destitution, this frigid 
inhospitableness — coupling in May, and bringing forth 
in Christmas time — a gestation carried on all of it 
below zero, more than half of it in Arctic darkness — 
living in perpetual snow, and dependent for life upon 
a never-ending activity — using the frozen water as 
a raft to traverse the open seas, that the water un- 
frozen may yield him the means of life. No time 
for hibernation has this Polar tiger: his life is one 
great winter." 
Z' 
