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.

[Illustration: Polar Bear]

That is one of the wonderful things about many wild animals--they are
of the _same color as the place where they live_. You know that the
color of a lion is yellow, like the color of sand; and the lion lives
in countries where there are lots of sandy places. You know, too, that
the color of a tiger is yellow, but with black stripes upon the
yellow, so that if you looked at him from a distance, you might think
he was made up of yellow and black stripes. And the tiger lives in the
tall grass, which also looks like yellow and black stripes.

But now I shall tell you more about the polar bear. He has three other
special things: the _soles_ of his feet are _hairy_; he has a _small
head_; and he has a _long neck_.

First, about the soles of his feet. The soles of the feet of other
bears are smooth, jus