How Mrs Inuit Saved The Polar Bears
by B. Craig Grafton
Ila Inuit, a widow, lived in the arctic circle with her adult son, Yuka. Her husband had accidentally harpooned himself a few years back, and was buried and perfectly preserved in the frozen tundra just outside their igloo. There she lived, quite contented with her way of life.
Alas, all that was about to change, and change for the worse. One day, her son, while surfing the internet, (that’s what he did all day, surfing the net just like any normal twenty-seven year old who lived at home would do) came upon some earth-shattering news.
“It says here, on the Arctic News Network,” he informed his mother, “that due to global warming and / or climate change, that our friends and neighbours, the polar bears, are dying off and facing extinction.”
“That’s just fake news,” his mother responded. “Why, just the other day, I saw the Polar Bear Family feasting quite contentedly on a cute, little, baby seal on their own, private ice floe.”
“But mother, it says here that it’s dangerous for them to do that. They say big chunks of ice the size of the Sahara Desert are breaking off with polar bears on them, and floating so far out to sea that when the polar bears try to swim back to land, they drown. Mother, we must do something to save them before it is too late.”
Ila now became concerned. For hadn’t she, in fact, seen the bears on a huge ice floe yesterday? And wasn’t it a fact that it was drifting out to sea when she saw them?
“I will go and talk to them and see if they are okay, and tell them they are endangered or in danger, whatever the case may be,” she told her son. “For what the internet says must be true. After all, I have seen it with my own eyes.”
So, Ila went to call on the Polar Bear Family and found that they were okay. She informed them that “some” (whoever “some” were) said that they were an endangered species due to global warming and doomed to extinction, unless something was done, and done soon, to save them.
“Just like I suspected,” Papa Polar Bear growled. “One of my kin has recently died due to heat-stroke. Oh, please, save us, Mrs. Inuit, for we polar bears are a dumb species. We are not smart like you humans, and since your species, not ours, has caused this problem, then you as a species are obligated to save us.”
Ila now felt guilty and ashamed of the human race and resolved, right then and there, to fix this man-made problem. So, she had Yuka get on the Internet to find the answer. He was good with the Internet and a good son, and was more than glad to help his mother.
Thank God for Al Gore inventing the Internet, said Ila to herself as her son began his search. But little did she know that Al Gore also invented global warming and climate change, too.
And all of this was happening while global warming and / or climate change only got more and more worse, and the polar bears became even more endangered, (or in danger, whatever the case may be) for now, great, white hunters had heard of the soon-to-be extinction of the polar bears and were flocking in great numbers to the great, white north to bag a trophy before they were all gone.
“Mother,” Yuka finally announced one morning, after pulling an all-nighter on the net searching for an answer. “I have found a way for you to save the polar bears.”
“What is it, my wonderful son?”
“Barbering,” he replied.
Ila was nonplussed, but Yuka explained his idea to his mother, and she took an online barbering course and got her online barber’s license. Then she went off to tell the Polar Bear Family how she would save them all.
“Here’s what I am going to do to save you bears,” she informed them. “I am a licensed barber now. I will shave each and every one of you so that you are completely hairless, just like a Mexican Chihuahua. No hunter will want you for a stuffed trophy or a bear rug, since you will look so gross and disgusting, so pinkish with blue-blooded veins showing through your transparent skin, visible all over your hairless, gross bodies. Why, you will look just like a giant, mutant, hairless, pink baby rat. No one wants a rat for a trophy. And in the bargain,” she added, “you will be relieved of your heavy fur coats, remain cool, calm, and collected, and will not die of heat exhaustion or heat-stroke.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said an enthused Papa Polar Bear. “Let’s do it!”
So, Ila went to work and shaved them all, and the plan worked, for no more hunters sallied forth to kill such gross and disgusting creatures.The bears and Ila loved it, for after all, when a plan comes together, doesn’t everyone just love it? Ila kept on shaving the bears each month to prevent the growth of their warm, thick fur.
But alas, the plan came together too well. Soon, each new generation of baby polar bears were born with less and less hair. Darwinism had kicked in here, adapting the polar bears’ bodies to global warming and / or climate change.
This became upsetting to Papa Polar Bear as he grew old. He was twenty-one years old in bear years, which is ninety-two point four years in human years. He worried that future generations of his kind would never know of the time when polar bears once wore beautiful, thick, white, shiny, fur coats and were fierce animals feared by man. He decided to go to Ila for the answer to this new problem. For if she solved their problem before, then she could certainly solve this new problem that she had created by fixing the old problem. She owed them that much, the way he figured it.
As I said, global warming was getting more and more worse daily, and it was taking an accelerated course, just like all the experts had predicted, and the frozen tundra started to thaw, and that included the thawing of the body of Ila’s husband. Ila became worried again. How was she going to preserve him, now that things were changing so rapidly? So, she had Yuka get back on the Internet again. And voila, he found an answer. This time, it was taxidermy. So, Ila took an online taxidermy course and got her online license to practice taxidermy. Then, she stuffed her husband and put him outside her barber shop just like an old-fashioned wooden Indian. That way, she could be with him each day while she worked, yet have him far enough away so that he couldn’t bother her, like he did when he was alive.
On the day she did so, old Papa Polar Bear came to the shop for a shave and noticed Ila’s husband standing outside the door with a harpoon in his hand, poised ready to throw it. He never cared much for that man. After all, her husband had tried to kill him once, and he hadn’t been all that good with a harpoon, anyway. Everyone knew that. But he admired Ila’s handiwork, and the first thing he said as he entered her shop was, “I like what you’ve done with your husband, out there. Can you do that to me when I’m gone?”
“Well, like the sign on the door says, ‘Barber Shop and Taxidermy. I cut ‘em or stuff ‘em. Your choice’,” she giggled.
Papa Polar Bear sat down in the barber’s chair. “Cut me. Don’t stuff me. Not just yet, anyway,” he joked.
During their idle conversation while she shaved him, Papa Polar Bear told her of his most recent worries about the need to preserve polar bear heritage before they became an entirely different-looking species altogether, and asked, as nonchalantly as he could, for Ila to help them again.
This time, Ila did not have to have Yuka go to the Internet for an answer. She already knew the answer. Barbering and taxidermy were obviously the combined answer, here. So, Ila told Papa Polar Bear that she would save all the fur from him each time she shaved him, then superglue it all back onto him when he died. Then she would stuff him and pose him, in a fierce, growling, snarling position, with sharpened claws extended, in front of her husband outside her shop, so that it would look like Papa Polar Bear was attacking him. Besides, she thought such an oddity would be good for business. (But she kept this to herself.)
Papa Polar Bear was relieved and overjoyed with that answer, and told all his friends and relatives that that was what he was going to do with himself when he died. His friends and neighbours liked the idea and pledged themselves to do likewise. Thus, polar bear heritage would be preserved so that all future generations of polar bears would know that their ancestors were once a proud, fierce, furred species, not a bunch of pink, pantywaist pansies like they were morphing into, thanks to Darwinism.
That’s how Mrs. Inuit saved the polar bears, not only from global warming and / or climate change and from extinction, but saved – as in, the preserved sense of the word – them (as well as her husband) for posterity, too.
Alas, all that was about to change, and change for the worse. One day, her son, while surfing the internet, (that’s what he did all day, surfing the net just like any normal twenty-seven year old who lived at home would do) came upon some earth-shattering news.
“It says here, on the Arctic News Network,” he informed his mother, “that due to global warming and / or climate change, that our friends and neighbours, the polar bears, are dying off and facing extinction.”
“That’s just fake news,” his mother responded. “Why, just the other day, I saw the Polar Bear Family feasting quite contentedly on a cute, little, baby seal on their own, private ice floe.”
“But mother, it says here that it’s dangerous for them to do that. They say big chunks of ice the size of the Sahara Desert are breaking off with polar bears on them, and floating so far out to sea that when the polar bears try to swim back to land, they drown. Mother, we must do something to save them before it is too late.”
Ila now became concerned. For hadn’t she, in fact, seen the bears on a huge ice floe yesterday? And wasn’t it a fact that it was drifting out to sea when she saw them?
“I will go and talk to them and see if they are okay, and tell them they are endangered or in danger, whatever the case may be,” she told her son. “For what the internet says must be true. After all, I have seen it with my own eyes.”
So, Ila went to call on the Polar Bear Family and found that they were okay. She informed them that “some” (whoever “some” were) said that they were an endangered species due to global warming and doomed to extinction, unless something was done, and done soon, to save them.
“Just like I suspected,” Papa Polar Bear growled. “One of my kin has recently died due to heat-stroke. Oh, please, save us, Mrs. Inuit, for we polar bears are a dumb species. We are not smart like you humans, and since your species, not ours, has caused this problem, then you as a species are obligated to save us.”
Ila now felt guilty and ashamed of the human race and resolved, right then and there, to fix this man-made problem. So, she had Yuka get on the Internet to find the answer. He was good with the Internet and a good son, and was more than glad to help his mother.
Thank God for Al Gore inventing the Internet, said Ila to herself as her son began his search. But little did she know that Al Gore also invented global warming and climate change, too.
And all of this was happening while global warming and / or climate change only got more and more worse, and the polar bears became even more endangered, (or in danger, whatever the case may be) for now, great, white hunters had heard of the soon-to-be extinction of the polar bears and were flocking in great numbers to the great, white north to bag a trophy before they were all gone.
“Mother,” Yuka finally announced one morning, after pulling an all-nighter on the net searching for an answer. “I have found a way for you to save the polar bears.”
“What is it, my wonderful son?”
“Barbering,” he replied.
Ila was nonplussed, but Yuka explained his idea to his mother, and she took an online barbering course and got her online barber’s license. Then she went off to tell the Polar Bear Family how she would save them all.
“Here’s what I am going to do to save you bears,” she informed them. “I am a licensed barber now. I will shave each and every one of you so that you are completely hairless, just like a Mexican Chihuahua. No hunter will want you for a stuffed trophy or a bear rug, since you will look so gross and disgusting, so pinkish with blue-blooded veins showing through your transparent skin, visible all over your hairless, gross bodies. Why, you will look just like a giant, mutant, hairless, pink baby rat. No one wants a rat for a trophy. And in the bargain,” she added, “you will be relieved of your heavy fur coats, remain cool, calm, and collected, and will not die of heat exhaustion or heat-stroke.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said an enthused Papa Polar Bear. “Let’s do it!”
So, Ila went to work and shaved them all, and the plan worked, for no more hunters sallied forth to kill such gross and disgusting creatures.The bears and Ila loved it, for after all, when a plan comes together, doesn’t everyone just love it? Ila kept on shaving the bears each month to prevent the growth of their warm, thick fur.
But alas, the plan came together too well. Soon, each new generation of baby polar bears were born with less and less hair. Darwinism had kicked in here, adapting the polar bears’ bodies to global warming and / or climate change.
This became upsetting to Papa Polar Bear as he grew old. He was twenty-one years old in bear years, which is ninety-two point four years in human years. He worried that future generations of his kind would never know of the time when polar bears once wore beautiful, thick, white, shiny, fur coats and were fierce animals feared by man. He decided to go to Ila for the answer to this new problem. For if she solved their problem before, then she could certainly solve this new problem that she had created by fixing the old problem. She owed them that much, the way he figured it.
As I said, global warming was getting more and more worse daily, and it was taking an accelerated course, just like all the experts had predicted, and the frozen tundra started to thaw, and that included the thawing of the body of Ila’s husband. Ila became worried again. How was she going to preserve him, now that things were changing so rapidly? So, she had Yuka get back on the Internet again. And voila, he found an answer. This time, it was taxidermy. So, Ila took an online taxidermy course and got her online license to practice taxidermy. Then, she stuffed her husband and put him outside her barber shop just like an old-fashioned wooden Indian. That way, she could be with him each day while she worked, yet have him far enough away so that he couldn’t bother her, like he did when he was alive.
On the day she did so, old Papa Polar Bear came to the shop for a shave and noticed Ila’s husband standing outside the door with a harpoon in his hand, poised ready to throw it. He never cared much for that man. After all, her husband had tried to kill him once, and he hadn’t been all that good with a harpoon, anyway. Everyone knew that. But he admired Ila’s handiwork, and the first thing he said as he entered her shop was, “I like what you’ve done with your husband, out there. Can you do that to me when I’m gone?”
“Well, like the sign on the door says, ‘Barber Shop and Taxidermy. I cut ‘em or stuff ‘em. Your choice’,” she giggled.
Papa Polar Bear sat down in the barber’s chair. “Cut me. Don’t stuff me. Not just yet, anyway,” he joked.
During their idle conversation while she shaved him, Papa Polar Bear told her of his most recent worries about the need to preserve polar bear heritage before they became an entirely different-looking species altogether, and asked, as nonchalantly as he could, for Ila to help them again.
This time, Ila did not have to have Yuka go to the Internet for an answer. She already knew the answer. Barbering and taxidermy were obviously the combined answer, here. So, Ila told Papa Polar Bear that she would save all the fur from him each time she shaved him, then superglue it all back onto him when he died. Then she would stuff him and pose him, in a fierce, growling, snarling position, with sharpened claws extended, in front of her husband outside her shop, so that it would look like Papa Polar Bear was attacking him. Besides, she thought such an oddity would be good for business. (But she kept this to herself.)
Papa Polar Bear was relieved and overjoyed with that answer, and told all his friends and relatives that that was what he was going to do with himself when he died. His friends and neighbours liked the idea and pledged themselves to do likewise. Thus, polar bear heritage would be preserved so that all future generations of polar bears would know that their ancestors were once a proud, fierce, furred species, not a bunch of pink, pantywaist pansies like they were morphing into, thanks to Darwinism.
That’s how Mrs. Inuit saved the polar bears, not only from global warming and / or climate change and from extinction, but saved – as in, the preserved sense of the word – them (as well as her husband) for posterity, too.