Polar Bears: A Safety Tip

polarbear

Polar bears might look cuddly but in fact they are very dangerous creatures. Here, Frank reveals a top tip for keeping safe when dealing with them…

You might, in the unimaginably harsh gale-swept subzero temperatures in the frozen hell of the polar wastes, become peckish, particularly if your picnic hamper fell down that crevasse over there.

If so, wrap up warm and plod out into the ice and snow until you see a polar bear. These are big fierce creatures, but using skill, judgement, and weaponry, you should be able to kill one.

That done, drag the slaughtered polar bear back to your nice warm hut. Using an axe, chop it to pieces, each piece being no bigger than a baby’s clenched fist. Sort the chunks out by type, i.e., fur, bone, sinew, fat, flesh, innards, what have you. Select the chunks that look toothsome, and place them in a large pot. Fill the pot with water, and bring to the boil. Place a lid on the pot and let it simmer for untold hours. Top up the water from time to time. While it is cooking, feed the unselected less toothsome chunks of polar bear, raw, to the huskies. Anything they leave can be put into a blender and liquidised. Heat this slop in a pan until it is the consistency of mayonnaise. Transfer the decisively-boiled polar bear chunks from the pot to a plate, pour over the liquid from the pan as a sauce, and tuck in.

Important note: however toothsome it appears, on no account should you eat the polar bear’s liver. It is highly toxic, containing a terrifyingly high concentration of retinol, the form of vitamin A found in members of the animal kingdom. If eaten in one meal, 30 to 90 grams of polar bear liver is enough to kill a human being, or to make even sled dogs very ill. Believe you me, you will not want to come down with a case of acute hypervitaminosis A. The symptoms include drowsiness, sluggishness, irritability, severe headache, bone pain, blurred vision, vomiting, peeling skin, flaking around the mouth, full-body skin loss, liver damage, haemorrhage, coma and death.

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About Author Profile: Frank Key

Frank Key is a London-based writer, blogger and broadcaster best known for his Hooting Yard blog, short-story collections and his long-running radio series Hooting Yard on the Air, which has been broadcast weekly on Resonance FM since April 2004. By Aerostat to Hooting Yard - A Frank Key Reader, an ideal introduction to his fiction, is published for Kindle by Dabbler Editions. Mr Key's Shorter Potted Brief, Brief Lives was published in October 2015 by Constable and is available to buy online and in all good bookshops.

2 thoughts on “Polar Bears: A Safety Tip

  1. finalcurtain@gmail.com'
    Mahlerman
    February 20, 2015 at 10:11

    That’s what I love about your posts Frank – you strike at the essence, the very pith. Forget trying to drag a 700kg polar bear across the ice-flow whilst keeping an eye out for a three-pin socket for the blender; just remember not to eat the liver…..don’t eat the liver…..don’t eat the liver…..

    • markcfdbailey@gmail.com'
      Recusant
      February 20, 2015 at 15:25

      Comment of the month, Mahlerman.

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