The Last Polar Bears

Roo lives with Harry Horse and Mandy in an old farmhouse in the Scottish Borders. She has turned down several film offers since the publication of The Last Polar Bears, preferring instead to concentrate on rabbits. It is her ambition to own one eventually. She is currently working on her first book, provisionally entitled The Bad Rabbits.

Harry Horse writes and illustrates children’s books. His titles include The Last Gold Diggers, for which he won the Smarties Gold Award. He is well known as a political cartoonist and has produced cartoons for the New Yorker, the Guardian and the Sunday Herald. Unusually, rabbits do not play a large part in his life.

Some other books by Harry Horse

THE LAST CASTAWAYS

THE LAST COWBOYS

THE LAST GOLD DIGGERS

After publication of this book, it was pointed out to me that it bears some resemblance to Mervyn Peake’s Letters from a Lost Uncle. I should like to point out that although I greatly admire Mervyn Peake’s work, any similarities are purely coincidental, my inspiration being members of my family, in particular my grandfather and my dog Roo.

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I am writing to let you know that Roo and I are well. I’m sorry that I was unable to say goodbye to you properly and I hope that you can understand why I had to go on this expedition. I am going to the North Pole to find the Last Polar Bears. I have to see them as they really are. I want to see them swimming amongst the icebergs and playing in the snow.

You see, I remember going to the zoo one hot summer’s afternoon and seeing my first polar bear.

He was sitting in the shade of a dead tree. There was a small concrete pool for him to swim in. The water was green. I looked at the polar bear. There was no snow for him to roll in, no icebergs for him to float upon… That was no life for a polar bear!

I could not save him. How could I? You can hardly smuggle a polar bear under your coat and walk out with him, can you?

That day, I decided to go to the North Pole to see how the polar bears really live. I went to the library and I read everything I could find

about polar bears: where they live, what they eat, and how to look for them in remote places. I studied many maps until one day, in the British Museum, I found the map of Great Bear Ridge, and I knew then that that is where I would find the Last Polar Bears.

I began to plan an expedition. Your mother said I was too old to go off to the North Pole by myself, but all my life I have either been too old or too young to do what I wanted to do, so this time I decided that I would listen to no one. I booked my passage on the good ship Unsinkable.