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His life at Les Fontaines suited him well enough, individually. It was a kind of hibernation. He slept a good deal, and ate a good deal, and smoked incessantly, and took very little exercise. For all that is best and noblest in life, Captain Palliser might just as well have been dead. He had outlived hope and ambition, thought, invention.
The creature had gone into hibernation weeks before: he was deep in the cold-trance that mysterious coma of which the wisest naturalists have no real knowledge when the tree fell. He hadn't in the least counted on being disturbed until the leaves budded out in spring.
So it came that one day, towards the end of Steve's convalescence, the Superintendent found himself occupying the solitary chair, with Steve lounging smoking on the be-patterned coverlet of the bed, talking of the Unaga Indians and their habits of hibernation which sounded so incredible to the man who had never seen for himself. Steve had a bunch of mail lying on the bed beside him.
She knew the local flora well, and kept a daybook of the wildflowers found in the longitude and latitude of Waupegan; and she was an indefatigable ornithologist, going forth with notebook and opera glass in hand. She spoke much of Thoreau and Burroughs and they were the nucleus of her summer library; she said that they gained tang and vigor from their winter hibernation at the cottage.
Like all creatures with oxygen-and-water based metabolisms, the Moruans could trace their evolutionary line to minute one-celled salt-water creatures; but with the bitter cold of the planet, the first land-creatures to emerge from the primeval swamp of Morua VIII had developed the heavy furs and the hibernation characteristics of bear-like mammals.
Then he hunts himself out a hollow tree or rock-shelter, curls himself up quietly to sleep, and snores away the whole livelong winter. During this period of hibernation, the action of the heart is reduced to a minimum, and the bear breathes but very slowly.
He learned nothing because he felt interest, emulation, curiosity about nothing. His nature was still dull, dumb, dormant; and what he calls a period of vegetation might more fitly be termed a moral and intellectual hibernation. His school life is a weary, colourless, featureless part of his autobiography. He would seem to have made neither friends nor enemies.
"What sort of stuff is 'hibernation'?" she demanded suddenly. "Hibernation!" I exclaimed. "Yes. They found a patch of it on a bone that was discovered in a pond at St. Mary Cray, and a similar patch on one that was found at some place in Essex. Now, I want to know what 'hibernation' is." "You must mean 'eburnation," I said, after a moment's reflection.
That scene marked the beginning of the return of Gusterson's mind and memory. He shuffled around for a bit, spoke vaguely to three or four people he recalled from the dream days, and then headed for home and supper three weeks late, and as disoriented and emaciated as a bear coming out of hibernation. Six months later Fay was having dinner with Daisy and Gusterson.
Thus, even among warm-blooded animals like the bears and dormice, hibernation actually occurs to a very considerable degree; but it is far more common and more complete among cold-blooded creatures, whose bodies do not need to be kept heated to the same degree, and with whom, accordingly, hibernation becomes almost a complete torpor, the breathing and the action of the heart being still further reduced to very nearly zero.
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