Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 June 1893 — BRUIN AS A SEALER. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

BRUIN AS A SEALER.

The White Bear’s Fiendish Instinct. James Carter in the New York Ledger, ’ Like produce -similar habits in men and animals. During the cold and darkness of the polar winter in Greenland there are no other substances than ice and snow that can be used as building materials and no possibility of making extended: journeys to procure better. Consequently the Esquimaux, or, as they are now called. Innuits, build, as is well known, their win- * ter habitations of ice and snow. The Greenland seal does the same, for the temperature of the Greenland winter is too severe for hejf unsheltered young. Breaking a hole through the snow-covered ice before it is too thick, the female seal digs out with her flipper a space sufficient for her purpose, a space which she forms into a dome-shaped apartment resembling the interior of an Innuit hut. Here the young seal is born, and here it rests upon its ice-shelf until the feeble arctic sun melts away the snow that shelters and protects it, after which it is old enough to take care of itself. One of the most incomprehensible circumstances connected with this seal nursery is the manner in which the mother is able to feed her baby. Diving through the hole, which she always keeps clear, breaking the new ice as soon as it forms, Ae travels for miles, and is not only able to return directly to the hole near which her young one awaits her, but catches fish in the utter darkness, below many feet of ice and snow, of the water in which she swims. How this is possible is an unsolved problem in natural history. Her nursery is well hidden. Abgve her stretch miles upon miles of untrodden snow that betrays no sign of her retreat, except a very small aperture, from which issues a thin and almost invisible stream of warm vapor, the breath of the seals. The unaided intelligence of man would be unable to discover a seal iglu, as the nursery of these animals are-called. The Innuits discover it by.means of their dogs; The white bear finds it out himself. When he encounters a “blow-hole,” or breath-ing-hole, he not only digs about it with all the might he has, but leaps up and down, using his ponderous weight to crush in the snow that roofs the seal’s iglu. Having effected an enterance, the savage housebreaker catches the baby seal, the mother easily escaping before he can get to her. He now commits a cruel deed —so barbarous and fiendish a stratagem it would seem that po animal but man could be guilty of it. Catching the helpless little seal baby by one flipper, he deliberately reaches down and plays it about in the water beneath the ice in order to tempt its mother within reach. The fisher is always successful. Drawn by maternal love and solicitude, the mother-seal rushes to the rescue of her offspring, the bear catches her with his disengaged claw, and gets a supply of meat that satisfies even his voracious appetite,.,, and enables him to live a while without food, for, with bears and Innuits in Greenland, it, is often a long time between meals. The Innuits themselves have learned this trick of the white bear.

When a young seal is captured, a cord is attached to a hind flipper, and the little creature is let down through the ice, while the hunter watches the opening in the ice, ready to spear the mother as she appears to help her little one.

BAITING THE MOTHER SEAL WITH HER YOUNG.