The final book in the adventure series is a bit of a disappointment. On this final job, the Hunt brothers are sent to Greenland and Alaska to capture polar animals for their father's Long Island animal farm. It feels like going through the motions just so Willard Price can tick off the tundra location on his series. The writing is flat and the characters uninspired. There's Olrick, a helpful Eskimo lad who helps them out, Zeb, a half-hearted villain with zero menace who drops out after a few chapters, and Nanook, a friendly polar bear that is again unrealistically tamed by Roger. The boys get into all manner of scrapes and adventures as usual, including near starving to death, being cast adrift on an ice floe, and caught in various types of Arctic storms. There's very little sense of plot progression across chapters as the animals are dutifully rounded up. There is also no real mention of global warming when the ice cap is visited, as this was written before such concerns were around.
Although this last entry tries to be conservation minded, there are still some unpleasant reminders of historical cruelty, such as Hal's remark that their captured killer whale will be happy learning tricks in a zoo. There are also some more unbelievable acquisitions in the form of a giant squid and a humpback whale, both of which have never been bagged for entertainment purposes. Two thirds of the way through the book, the boys leave the North Pole behind and travel to Alaska to complete their collection. Their final animal is a huge Kodiak bear that's been massacring people after his mate was shot. Price inaccurately tells us that the Kodiak is the largest bear on the planet, when it is in fact the polar bear. With their work done, the book ends abruptly with the brothers being awarded a trust fund so they can study to become fully qualified naturalists.
Rating: 2/5
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