The Polar Bear
This kind of bear is called the polar bear. (See the picture on page 155.) He lives in a place far up North, where it is always very cold. The land is nearly covered with snow, and the water at the top of the sea is frozen. There are no berries or fruits there for the polar bear to eat; so he has to live on fish, and seal, which is a water animal. The way the bear catches the fish or the seal is this:
He makes a hole in the ice with his paws, so that he can reach the water below. Then he sits down very quietly by the edge of the hole, and waits for a fish or a seal to swim past the hole. Then the bear pounces on it very quickly with his paw or his jaws, and catches it.
If the ice is too thick for the bear to make a hole through it, he has to try another way. He comes right down to the part of the sea where some of the ice has broken off. There he chooses a place at the edge of the ice, close to the water; and he waits there for a fish or a seal to swim past. Then he pounces on it and catches it.
Now I shall tell you a few special things that the polar bear has.
His coat of hair is much thicker than the coat of any other bear. Why? Because he lives in a colder place than any other bear; so he needs a thicker coat. Also, he sometimes has to swim through the icy water to get to some floating field of ice, so that he can catch fish from it. Then, although his hair gets wet, he has a thick lining of fat inside his coat to keep him warm.
The next special thing about the polar bear is that his hair is all white—like the color of everything around him, which, as I have told you, is just snow and ice. So when the polar bear sits down very quietly on the snow and ice, nobody can see him even from a short distance, because he is the same color as the snow and ice. And that is why the fish or the seal does not see him, and so gets caught.
Polar Bear