THE MIND OF A BEAR
r .IZZIE, the little Polar bear, whose address is the Mappin Terraces, Regent's Park, has won a bigger circulation than any animal at the Zoo, thanks to a recent escapade. She fell into the pit—the deep and wide con- crete pit that, on the best Hagenbeck methods, separates the animals from the public. Having fallen, she showed some reluctance, like the Prisoner of Chillon, to regain her qualified freedom. The two episodes in association have appealed to public sentiment and curiosity, as did the tragedy of the Polar bear's short-lived motherhood a year ago.
In the interests of historical truth it is necessary to state that Lizzie did not desire to leap the chasm—a thing no bear would ever attempt. But she lived a rather melancholy life with a consort twenty years older than herself, and his ways were cantankerous. She was ruled with a rod of iron—not cruelly, but masterfully. If her master chose a front place she was forced to stay at the back ; and generally was allowed little exercise of her will. It may be that she tried to escape ; it may be that she was shoved when peering over the edge ; but the bears not infrequently fall into the pit and the fall does not hurt them in the least. It would be a pity if this short his- torical discursus were to rob Lizzie of her circulation, for the more people who go to the Mappin Terraces the better.
Bears on the whole take kindly to captivity, even the grizzly, though he is judged too dangerous for the terraces. It is true that age sours them, in the wild as in the tame state ; but as babies they are wholly engaging and kindly and docile ; and even when they grow more cross and treacherous they do not rebel against captivity. Are there any animals in any Zoo in the world who look quite so delightfully at home as the American bears, playing about the natural outcrop of rocks in the Bronx Zoo outside New York, where Professor Hornaday has made (natural) history with as much originality as Mr. Chalmers Mitchell ? In London, too, the bears are quite free from that mad, anxious, iterated chasse, by 'Which the wolves or hyena— the least tamable of all beasts—try to satisfy their instinct to range. The bears are wiser or possess a more torpid spirit. They pile up fat in the summer and live on it in the sleepy winter. But in general the males, especially of the Polar tribes, are more restless than the females. In the midst of an Arctic winter the fathers forage and wander considerable distances, covering the ice easily, thanks to the hair beneath their feet—a special and noteworthy adaptation or response to surrounding conditions.
Nearly all the bears are remarkable athletes, with cer- tain very definite deficiencies. They can run and swim at a pace and with a power of endurance scarcely to be paralleled ; and most of them can climb, though the grizzly, like the human child, probably loses its prehensile faculty at a certain age. The power of muscle is incredible.
The writer saw a good deal of the grizzly bean; one spring in the Selkirks, that gorgeous range of the Rockies which are his last home. They had emerged lean and hungry from their wintering, with a passionate desire for flesh food. Their favourite prey was the quaint, engaging little rodent, the gopher, which found even deep holes under rocks an insufficient protection. The grizzlies scratched up and flung aside stones that weighed certainly as much as half a ton. They can gallop over rough ground pretty well as fast as a horse, and do in fact run down wild ponies. They will pull a tree open in search of honey. What the grizzly can do on land the Polar bear can do at sea. He can swim leagues at a stretch and not seldom makes long migrations on the ice. But all this athleticism does not include the capacity to leap. The bear is no leopard ; and this gap in its athleticism makes it quite certain that Lizzie did not attempt an heroic leap. It was not for such work that the five straight toes were designed.
Recent improvements at the Zoo in Regent's Park have added immensely to the general happiness by virtue of an imaginative grasp of the instinct of the several species.
The various sorts of bear differ remarkably in spite of their likeness of formation. Between the convex head of the Polar bear, who always looks an aristocrat, and the concave head of the black is a profound difference of psychology. It was the writer's fortune to see on con- secutive days, while camping in the Selkirks, a grizzly— his hue was unusually grey—hunting goat and a black bear seeking vegetarian fodder. The whole appearance of the grizzly, his manner and his gait, suggested savagery and power. The black bear looked the most domestic creature imaginable. She happened to be squatting in the very midst of a carpet of very blue forget-me-nots, covering the slope of a hill alongside an old prospector's path. To shoot her would have been sheer murder. Not to shoot the grizzly required the suppression of an instinct. You felt, even with a modern weapon in the hand, something of the hunter's exultation, a kinship with Hiawatha who won undying fame from the duel with the mighty Mishe-Mokwa, when he returned with the necklet of twenty claws. The American black bear— which is as often as not a beautiful brown in colour—is a kindly vegetarian. The Polar bear is more carnal ; and it is thanks to his absence from the Antarctic that the penguins remain multitudinous there. The two species could hardly inhabit the same region for long. But at the Zoo we are not much concerned with these differences or with questions of distribution. Brown bears and black bears sit up and stand up engagingly to beg for nuts and bread. The Polar bears keep a higher dignity and may not be promiscuously fed. But all these species and varieties flourish side by side in Regent's Park, looking cheerful and happy enough and living to a good old age. Iron bars do not a prison make nor concrete pits a cage. Nevertheless, Lizzie is happier with her two new com- panions than she was with her domineering master before the fall. All is well at the Terrace.
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