Referendum

Greenland. 600 words, 3 minute read. With Claude Sonnet.

The GPS unit on Donald's wrist chirped its fifth low-battery warning of the day. He pulled back his sleeve to silence it, his joints creaking like the ice beneath his boots. Twenty years in the Arctic had taught him to read these temperatures in his bones: minus thirty-five, maybe minus forty with the wind chill. The type of cold that turned breath into daggers and made him question what he was doing up here, tracking down Greenland's last unaccounted-for polar bear.

The fjord stretched before him like a cathedral carved in ice, its walls rising hundreds of meters toward a sky the color of old pearls. Here and there, dark rock thrust through the white expanse – ancient gneiss that had witnessed millennia of winters. Donald paused to adjust his pack, watching a small avalanche of snow cascade down one of the distant cliffs. The sound reached him seconds later, a soft whisper of displacement.

His sat phone buzzed. Probably Magnus back at the research station, wanting another update. Donald let it ring. How could he explain this mission without sounding crazy? Even the official proposal had been a masterpiece of academic understatement: "A novel approach to gauge indigenous wildlife response to human territorial demarcation."

The tracking data suggested she was close. Donald had followed this particular bear's radio signature for months, watching her navigate the increasingly fragmented ice with an intelligence that bordered on prescience. She was always one step ahead, as if she knew the significance of being the last holdout in his survey.

A movement caught his eye – a flash of cream-colored fur against the deeper white of a snowbank. Donald's hand instinctively went to the bear spray on his belt, then relaxed. She was already watching him, head slightly tilted, eyes reflecting nothing but calm curiosity.

"There you are," he whispered.

The bear's muscles rippled beneath her fur as she shifted position, but she made no move to flee or charge. She was larger than he'd expected, her coat surprisingly clean for this time of year. A few old scars marked her nose and shoulders, telling stories of fights won and lost on the increasingly competitive hunting grounds.

Donald's fingers, clumsy in their thick gloves, worked the straps of his pack. The bear watched as he withdrew two fresh Arctic char, their scales still gleaming with ice crystals. He placed them carefully on a flat stretch of snow, then set up the small flags he'd been carrying for weeks: Denmark's Dannebrog beside one fish, the Stars and Stripes by the other.

His camera whirred to life, its screen displaying the temperature warning he'd learned to ignore. The bear's ears twitched at the sound, but her gaze remained fixed on Donald, not the fish. Something in that steady look made him feel foolish, like a child caught in an elaborate game of make-believe.

She moved with the liquid grace that had let her species rule these waters for hundreds of thousands of years. Each step was precisely placed, leaving barely a trace in the fresh snow. Donald held his breath, suddenly aware that he was capturing something far more significant than a publicity stunt for Greenland's independence referendum.

The bear stopped short of the fish. Her nostrils flared once, twice. Then she did something that made Donald question everything he thought he knew about these creatures. She looked – deliberately, unmistakably – at each flag in turn. Her lip curled, exposing a flash of yellow teeth. The sound she made wasn't quite a snort, wasn't quite a growl, but it carried volumes of meaning nonetheless.

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