The Colorbear Saga

A Lesson in Colorbear Art Through the Ages

Earliest known bear art, found in a cave.

All art looked like that until Leonardo da Berci became the first artist to add identifying features.

Bearangelo and Rabearphael were the first to experiment with new eye and mouth shapes, respectively, in their portraits.

Rembearandt produced one of the great realist masterpieces with "The Noncolorbear" (painted from a live model, too zonked to move throughout the long time it took to paint.)

But it took Pablo Pibearso to make the great technical leap of giving his portraits noses, in his works "Hunger" and "Sleep".

After several molts, math had progressed in Bearis to the point where the most intelligent students learned addition and subtraction. Fruffy, another brilliant descendant of Xuffy, understood the idea of taking some honey baskets away from others. (That's why Fruffy was a bit overweight.) The ability to add and subtract brought a new dimension to life in Bearis. Fruffy showed his sister Kluffy how to make smaller baskets by cuttimg a few pawswidth off the basket reeds. And he also almost invented division by telling Cluffy to take away two redfruit from Puffy so they would each have five out of the ten they had picked, but an eleventh redfruit hit him on the head, destroying both his train of thought and the even divisibility of the number of redfruits.
Too bad Fruffy wasn't a Newtonian genius, but Bearis seemed to have a rather short supply of these. Fortunately, even though Fruffy missed division, the idea of making smaller baskets survived. This did create a problem for the keepers of the honeytrees. Before nature had provided reeds of exactly the right size to make baskets that would hold all of the honey that flowed from a tree in one night or one day. Stuffy and Sluffy, brother and sister, first noticed the problem one fine day when they had to watch more honey baskets than usual. Stuffy was sleepy, and decided to lie down next to one of the baskets. After a few hours, he woke and noticed that he was sitting in honey. After licking himself off, he started to think about the problem. He briefly considered changing the baskets when they were full, but decided it would be too confusing for him and his sister, and the other colorbears would never have understood how to collect baskets at different times each day. Sluffy suggested that if they couldn't vary when the baskets were changed, they should try to vary the rate of honey flow. So Stuffy tried several methods to get the trees to slow their rate of honey flow. He picked out a likely prospect and went to work.
Flattery: "You are such a fine, strong, wise, understanding, regal, old (but not too old) tree that I feel you would gladly slow the flow of honey--" The tree did not respond.
"Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please slow the flow of honey." The tree did not respond.
Stuffy got down on his knees and begged the tree to slow down the flow of honey. The tree did not respond.
Frustrated, Stuffy, stuffed his finger into the scoop hole in order to slow down the flow of honey. The tree responded. After a few hours, the pressure became so great that the tree exploded.
Stuffy decided to stop trying to get the tree to slow the flow of honey. There were too many splinters embedded in his fur and skin. But he temporarily had gotten out of changing the baskets -- Sluffy was too tender-hearted to let him do any work while he was convalescing.
Sluffy, who was a little more intelligent than her brother, made an announcement at the TV that night. She told everyone to use their old standard baskets for honey and the new sizes for everything else. Everyone just said "OK," without questioning what Sluffy wanted, because they were all generally nice to each other. They found out that it was more convenient anyway because with small baskets they would run out of honey earlier than they were used to, and no one had ever figured out how to make bigger baskets -- they couldn't make the reeds grow any longer than they already were.

A Television Explanation
When the noncolorbear who had traded them the big TV for a lot of redfruits (which don't grow in noncolorbear country) installed it, he had given a lot of thought to powering it. First he tried solar panels, since there weren't any power lines into Bearis, but some of the colorbears were really annoyed that their TV stopped about two hours after dark when the energy stored in the solar batteries was used up. Also, the colorbears were less than careful in their maintainence and gradually the solar panels (which were set flat on top of the TV) became covered with fallen leaves, branches, and dirt, and that blocked off the sun until the picture got fuzzy. So when the noncolorbear came back for the rest of his redfruits, the colorbears complained. The noncolorbear, an honest salesman (and almost free of his tranquilizer habit) promised to do something. He decided to run a power line out to Bearis, paid for by bears who would hang ads on the poles. But he knew that his airheaded little trading partners would probably try to use the line as a tightrope or something, so he told the power company to use its campaign for electric safety, which was aimed at children.
The advertising company had invented strange creatures bearing only a vague resemblance to any type of bear (see examples) to attract the attention of young noncolorbears. But the campaign backfired with the colorbears. First, the majority of colorbears cannot read, so they had no idea what the posters said. But, like the young noncolorbears, the strange creatures, who the salesbear had told them were Zax, Sarah, John, and Bob, fascinated the colorbears and they promptly incorporated them into their mythology. Because of John's honey-colored hair, they decided he was the keeper of honey, and the same for Sarah's red hair and redfruits, and Bob's dark complexion and basket reeds. Zax was god of power lines. Fuffy soon made up complicated rituals with which to appease the gods, including plans for a statue of the great Zax.
As we have demonstrated, the colorbears are pretty lacking in artistic talent. They even tried to duplicate the letters on the bottom of the posters, but not knowing what they were, only that if they were on every poster they must be sacred to the god, they turned out totally unreadable. The statue itself bore so little resemblance to the posters, even to the colorbears' eyes, that it was abandoned (with many rites to soothe the Great Zax.)

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