The Bear’s Unsuccessful Escape

In A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals, a captured bear cub, tethered by the neck to a whaler, swam to an ice floe and tried to get free. At a crack in the ice, it let the rope fall into the opening, lowered its body into the crack, and tried with its paws to push the rope over its head^[1]. When that failed, it ran hard away from the ship to jerk the rope loose, backed up, and tried again. The rope held; at last the cub lay down on the ice^[2].