III.] 
THE POLAR BEAR. 
J37 
scarcely to be eatable. In summer, however, they speedily eat 
themselves back into condition, and in autumn they are so fat 
that they would certainly take prizes at an exhibition of fat 
cattle. In the museum at Tromsoe there is preserved the 
backbone of a reindeer, shot on King Karl’s Land, which had a 
layer of fat seven to eight centimetres in thickness on the loin. 
The reindeer, in regions where it has been much hunted, is 
very shy, but, if the ground is not quite even, one can creep 
within range, if the precaution be taken not to approach it 
from the windward. During the rutting season, which falls in 
late autumn, it sometimes happens that the reindeer attacks 
the hunter. 
The Spitzbergen reindeer is not tormented, like the rein¬ 
deer in Lapland and on Novaya Zemlya, by ‘'gorm ” (inch-long 
larvae of a fly, which are developed under the animal’s skin). 
Its flesh is also better than that of the Lapp reindeer. None 
of the contagious diseases • which of late years have raged so 
dreadfully among the reindeer in northern Europe has ever, at 
least during the last fifty years, been common on Spitzbergen. 
The Polar bear occurs principally on coasts and islands which 
are surrounded by drift-ice, often even upon ice-fields far out at 
sea, for his best hunting is among the ice-floes. Now he is 
rather rare on the south-western coasts of Spitzbergen and 
Novaya Zemlya which are almost free of ice during summer, 
but more common on the northern parts of these islands, which 
are almost always surrounded by ice. Thus for instance during 
my many landings at Horn Sound, Bell Sound, Ice Fjord, Fore¬ 
land Sound, and King’s Bay, on the west coast of Spitzbergen, 
I have never seen a single bear. On the other hand, bears 
were seen at nearly every resting-place during the boat voyage 
I made in 1861 with Torell in Hinloopen Strait and along the 
shores of the most northerly islands on Spitzbergen, also during 
the sledge journey which Palander and I made in the spring of 
1873 round North East Land. The Polar bear is besides found 
