Captain Longbow And The Bears
(
MISCELLANEOUS PUZZLES)
That eminent and more or less veracious traveller Captain Longbow has a great grievance with the public. He claims that during a recent expedition in Arctic regions he actually reached the North Pole, but cannot induce anybody to believe him. Of course, the difficulty in such cases is to produce proof, but he avers that future travellers, when they succeed in accomplishing the same feat, will find evidence on the spot. He says that when he got there he saw a bear going round and round the top of the pole (which he declares is a pole), evidently perplexed by the peculiar fact that no matter in what direction he looked it was always due south. Captain Longbow put an end to the bear's meditations by shooting him, and afterwards impaling him, in the manner shown in the illustration, as the evidence for future travellers to which I have alluded.
When the Captain got one hundred miles south on his return journey he had a little experience that is somewhat puzzling. He was surprised one morning, on looking down from an elevation, to see no fewer than eleven bears in his immediate vicinity. But what astonished him more than anything else was the curious fact that they had so placed themselves that there were seven rows of bears, with four bears in every row. Whether or not this was the result of pure accident he cannot say, but such a thing might have happened. If the reader tries to make eleven dots on a sheet of paper so that there shall be seven rows of dots with four dots in every row, he will find some difficulty; but the captain's alleged grouping of the bears is quite possible. Can you discover how they were arranged?
Answer:
It might have struck the reader that the story of the bear impaled on the North Pole had no connection with the problem that followed. As a matter of fact it is essential to a solution. Eleven bears cannot possibly be arranged to form of themselves seven rows of bears with four bears in every row. But it is a different matter when Captain Longbow informs us that "they had so placed themselves that there were" seven rows of four bears. For if they were grouped as shown in the diagram, so that three of the bears, as indicated, were in line with the North Pole, that impaled animal would complete the seventh row of four, which cannot be obtained in any other way. It obviously does not affect the problem whether this seventh row is a hundred miles long or a hundred feet, so long as they were really in a straight line—a point that might perhaps be settled by the captain's pocket compass.
