Lumen Winter 2023 - Flipbook - Page 38
The last polar bear
By Nicholas Duddy
On a forty-nine-degree summer day, 8,000
miles from the North Pole, the last polar
bear arrives in Adelaide. She washes up
on the Glenelg shoreline, carried by the
incoming tide.
She lies facedown in white sand. Motionless.
Through pearls of spume, her frail form
looms. At first, she is overlooked.
A bum-bagged jogger mistakes her for
dumped shag; a myopic cyclist swears
she’s a beached bronze whaler; an amorous
elderly couple confuse her skeletal spine for
driftwood and recall that jetty where, many
moons ago, they first made love in the dark
of a starless night.
But the realisation soon follows. An angler
crashes the SS Fishfinger, his rusting tinny,
onto a sandbank forty feet from the bear.
Mouth agape, he rubs his bloodshot eyes.
He forgets about his inky bucket of squid
and whiting and garfish, and jumps into
knee-high water.
Walking her Beagle and her mother, an
eight-year-old girl is the first to touch the
polar bear. Her Beagle barks, yanking the
lead, pulling her to the bear. She’s never seen
anything so filthy, not even when Charlie
rolls in mud. With her glittery jelly shoe, she
kicks the polar bear’s paw. But the bear does
not stir. Mummy! she squeals through the
sleepy morning.
Within minutes, the first news team
arrives. In the carpark, the reporter stands
impatiently, receiving her final flick of
mascara, her final swirl of rouge, her left leg
quivering. The cameraman burns through
four durries – even the emergency one in his
sock. They both race to the beach.
REPORTER: (with iambic journalistic lilt.)
What’s YOUR name, YOUNG LADY?
YOUNG LADY: (with sonic texture of
honey.) Lucy. And so, in this moment, the
world’s last Ursus maritimus is named after
the little girl who first found her.
By midmorning news teams surround Lucy.
They outdo one another with their expert
coverage. One station enlists a zoologist,
who posits that Lucy circumnavigated the
world, drifting through the Arctic Ocean
on sea ice, down the northwest passage
between Canada and Greenland, across the
expanses of the Atlantic, snacking on marine
delicacies off the Angolan coast, before
traversing the Southern Ocean to Kangaroo
Island in pursuit of little penguins and longnosed fur seals, and finally crossing the Gulf
St Vincent to dock on Holdfast Bay.
38
THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE
This image, of a polar bear on the beach at Glenelg, was generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI) program
DALL-E2– a companion to the much discussed ChatGPT program. Its creation took less than ten minutes –
most of that user error.The actual image generation took less than a minute.
AI, and its future ramifications, will form part of the next issue of Lumen.
Another station interviews an acclaimed
psychic, who — after holding a lock of
Lucy’s fur and drinking a glass of seawater
— believes the bear suffered from severe
postpartum depression with her firstborn,
exacerbated further by her son’s death in a
freak fishing accident. She never recovered.
The crowd builds. They pass around SPF
100+ sunscreen and share broad-brimmed
hats. They create a rota for fetching food
and water, only leaving the bear for loo
breaks (one couple use nappies to overcome
this issue). Meanwhile, the police tape off a
twelve-metre radius around Lucy.
Feet invade every patch of sand. A local
church group stand on the beach and read
aloud Jeremiah 30:17 and pray for this
celestial bear’s wellbeing. Beside them, a
group of atheists stand in silence. In the
carpark, at the edge of beach and bitumen,
vendors sell plastic water bottles and markedup Kmart t-shirts featuring any picture of a
bear — brown, koala, Humphrey B. They sell
out in twenty-five minutes. Improvising, they
sell plain white tees with LUCY printed in
uneven Sharpie lettering.
Before the sun crowns the sky, Lucy is
a worldwide phenomenon. Every major
broadcaster — ABC, BBC, CNN, NBC,
WXYZ — has a reporter standing by;
Facebook live videos are narrated by woeful
Attenborough and Irwin and Bear Grylls
impressions; tweets weave a tapestry of
hashtags laden with threadbear puns.
Lucy — the little girl, not the last polar bear
— and Mummy now demand thousands per
interview. And with good reason: this is the
first polar bear sighted in twenty years, the
last confirmed sighting being by the Chukchi
people in Uelen near the Bering Sea.
But Lucy — the last polar bear, not
the little girl — has not moved. She
remains facedown, surrounded by twelve
veterinarians in face masks cleaning her fur.
They clip her jagged claws. They stroke her
back, gloved hands raking the ribbed outline
of brittle bones. Crab nets and beer cans
and ripped cloth wash away, strewn across
the shore like souvenirs. Her coat shimmers
bright white.
They roll her over. Repeat the process.
Like a snow angel, she lies supine in white
sand. Sunlight limns her silver limbs, and
the crowd weeps at the sight of Lucy, at the
might of beauty.
Distinguished guests arrive at Glenelg. They
take up their VIP positions at the front of
the crowd. The Premier of South Australia
foregoes his two o’clock kip, arriving in
green-and-gold boardies and thongs. He is
shown up, though, by the Prime Minister
who arrives in a navy pantsuit with an
Australian flag pinned to her lapel. She
waves off her Chief of Staff, who whispers
firmly to No. 10 and the White House and
the Kremlin that the Prime Minister will
have to return their calls.
The crowd is restless. Lucy still has not
moved. She needs to eat, one of the experts
deduces. With no blubber readily available,
they try feeding her a specially formulated
paste of prawns and breadcrumbs and
multivitamins, with just a pinch of paprika.
But she does not move. The angler has a
