Flood

60

May 2034

From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

The footage on the Toodlepip. com website was ambiguous. It was hard to be sure of the details or of the precise sequence of events, in a murky panorama of broken, slushy polar ice under a leaden sky, the blurred figures of the humans, the small, scrambling bear.

The flood was causing an extinction spasm, an event that was gathering pace rapidly. All over the world animals were driven from vanishing habitats, or slaughtered when they came into competition with humans for the remaining high ground. Birds were more mobile, but their nesting and feeding habits were always fragile; birds had been suffering since the beginning of the event, when a teenage Kristie had noted plunges in the populations of blue tits and other garden birds. As climate zones shifted or were drowned, vegetation was forced to relocate or succumb; the changes came much more rapidly than the life cycle of most trees, and the forests which burned or drowned were not replaced. Even the microbial world was stirred up, a cause of the new plagues which afflicted mankind.

Much of the dying was out of sight, however; coastal and shallow-water life was being erased all but invisibly, for example. Toodlepip. com ’s unique selling point was that it gathered images at the very point of these extinctions: pictures of the last of a kind succumbing to the dark, transmitted painlessly to the site’s remaining subscribers in Green Zone enclaves around the world. Some of these images were unspectacular. It was hard for most people who weren’t actually ecologists themselves to grieve over the destruction of a coral reef. But cute mammals were always a different story.

The polar bears had been the poster stars of the global warming crisis that had afflicted the planet long before the flood itself. Now, all around the Arctic ocean, every spring Toodlepip and other agencies watched anxiously, or eagerly, for the bears to emerge from hibernation, the crux point of the animals’ survival. If the sea ice melted the mother bears wouldn’t be able to get to the seal cubs whose meat they relied on after a winter’s hibernating. And if the mothers couldn’t feed, their babies starved, and that was that.

The last wild bear of all, it was commonly agreed, was a wretched starveling cub, stained yellow by the urine of its dead mother. And since the zoos had long been abandoned as expensive luxuries, the last in the wild was likely the last in the whole world, and the bears would join the elephants and the tigers and many, many more species in their final refuge in gene banks and zygote arks.

What wasn’t clear from the Toodlepip footage was whether the cub died of natural causes, or whether it had been shot by the Inuit hunter who had guided the camera team to this remote spot in the Canadian Arctic in the first place. Even that was a story, the last Inuit bringing down the last bear. There was so much chatter about the event that it broke into international news summaries.