There is an art to capturing polar bears. Each Inuit village has a differnt technique and there is considerable competition between villages in how effective their techniques really are. The most famous village of all had a technique that worked nearly all of the time. The technique stayed a secret until one old gentleman finally told the leaders of the other villages.

“The technique,” he said, “is to make a large hole in the ice. Then, you must surround the hole with fresh peas. They must be fresh. Canned ones will not work. After this, you wait. When the bear comes up to take a pea, you kick him in the ice hole.”

A reader of this page pointed out that an alternative way to catch the bear is to dig a hole in the ground, fill it with ashes, and surround it with peas. When the bear comes up, you…”

The very best response we got to these two stories was the following email received by Brian.

“I think it is totally wrong to hunt polar bears. They are starting to become endangered. We should be preserving them, not hunting them down and kicking them into holes!”

[name deleted to protect the innocent]

Gentle Ben, excuse me, Brian explained to her that it was a pun!

I recently re-posted the polar bear stories along with the complaint about bear abuse on alt.callahans. Quin Inuit quickly responded with the following addition.

Quinn smiles and casually orders a plain cranberry juice with seltzer. “If she was mad about that, she would’ve hated what we did to them in my village.

You see, we had a bunch of unusually violent polar bears in our area, and we needed a way to protect ourselves from them on the way to the monthly Point Barrow market.

It was a great market, but often turned into a disaster when the customers stayed home for fear. Finally, we hit upon a plan. We simply purchased a load of T-Bonds and used them to line a path to and from the market, as well as around the market itself. It took a lot of bonds, but it was worth it. After all…” Quinn pauses and sips his drink.

Everyone knows that bonds are the best hedge against a bear market.