One might expect that an animal thus capable of forming friendships would also show great parental affection. Accordingly we find this quality highly developed in the walrus, and the usual sportsman has given the usual account of how he witnessed it. A female, in this case, being wounded, placed her right fore fin or flipper about the body of her young calf, and endeavoured to shield it from the harpoon, against which its years were no protection, by the constant interposition of her own body. The terror of the calf, with the look of anxiety upon the mother’s face, accompanied with a reckless disregard of her own danger, were, we are told, most affecting, but did not, unfortunately, affect the result, both the poor animals being slaughtered. Walrus-hunters do not often let their feelings get the better of them, they prefer to get the better of the walruses, through _their_ feelings, which are tenderer. Thus, having caught a young one, they induce it to grunt, when the herd come to its assistance and are shot or harpooned. It is, however, to its habit of going in herds that the walrus owes much of its safety. Even though half famished, a polar bear would hardly venture to attack one—even if only a young one—under these circumstances. Indeed, though so large an animal, the polar bear contents himself, for the most part, with the smaller kinds of seals, which he catches when they are asleep on the ice—perhaps, sometimes, even in the sea: for he is a wonderful swimmer, though not shaped quite so much like a fish as is a seal, and with feet only, and not flippers, to swim with. So much is said about the great size and strength of the grizzly bear that one might think it was the largest of all the bear family, but this is not the case. The largest of all bears are the polar bears, and this proves that they get quite enough to eat, even though they live in the cold, bleak north, where there are no great forests full of birds and monkeys and all manner of creatures; no plains or prairies with antelopes, or bisons, or herds of wild horses or zebras bounding over them, but only desolate icefields or dreary wastes of snow. Life, indeed, in the far north or south, is poor in species, but it is—or, at least, it was, until civilised man came there to make it a solitude indeed—abundant in individuals. The ice has its own herds in the shape of numberless seals that lie upon it asleep or resting, enjoying what sun there is, during the short summer. Even in the winter, as these creatures must have air to breathe, they are accustomed to come out of the sea through holes in the ice, which they manage to keep open by constantly coming up in the same place, and so always breaking the ice, before it has time to get thick. The polar bears watch at these seal-holes, as they are called, and seize the seals as they come up, or else they wait till they have crawled out, and stalk them as they lie asleep. [Illustration: A BRAVE MOTHER.