then his articles of clothing, one after the other.[69] On the 6th
of March 1870, Dr. Boergen was attacked by a bear, and dragged a
considerable distance.[70] It is remarkable that the bear did not
this time either kill his prey, but that he had time to cry out, "A
bear is dragging me away;" and that, after the bear had dragged him
several hundred yards and he had got free, he could, though very
badly scalped, himself make his way back to the vessel. The scalping
had been done by the bear attempting to crush the skull in its
mouth, as it is accustomed to do to the seals it catches. Scoresby
considers it dangerous to hunt the Polar bear in deep snow. The
well-known Dane, C. Petersen, guide to McClintock, Kane and others,
on the other hand, considered it as little dangerous to attack a
bear as to slaughter a sheep. The Siberian traveller, Hedenstroem,
says that a man may venture to do so with a knife tied to a
walking-stick, and the Norwegian hunters, or at least the
Norwegian-Finnish harpooners, express themselves in much the same
way regarding "this noble and dangerous" sport.

The bear's principal food consists of the seal and walrus. It is
said that with a single stroke of his powerful paw he can cast a
walrus up on the ice. On the other hand he seldom succeeds in
catching the reindeer, because it is fleeter than the bear. I have,
however, in North East Land, on two occasions, seen blood and hair
of reindeer which had been caught by bears. There is not the least
doubt that, along with flesh, the bear also eats vegetable
substances, as seaweed, grass, and lichens. I have several times, on
examining the stomach of a bear that had been shot, found in it only
remains of vegetable substances; and the walrus-hunters know this so
well that they called a large old Polar bear, which Dr. Theel shot
at Port Dickson in 1875, "an old Land-king" that was too fat to go a
hunting, and therefore ate grass on land. He makes use besides of
food of many different kinds; a bear, for instance, in the winter
1865-66 consumed for Tobiesen the contents of two barrels of salt
fish, which he had left behind in a deserted hut.

The flesh of the bear, if he is not too old or has not recently
eaten rotten seal-flesh, is very eatable, being intermediate in
taste between pork and beef. The flesh of the young bear is white
and resembles veal. The eating of the liver causes sudden illness.

Although, as already mentioned, the Polar bear sometimes