Chunk. A Brief and Undignified Loss of Composure.
Spider Hennessy, Columnist (nom de plume) · megafauna / the wildcard hot-take
THE THICCC BEAT, the desk reacts. This week, our Mr. Hennessy, who has been asked to calm down.
I have been asked by the Senior Cataloguer to keep this professional. I will not be doing that.
Bear 32, "Chunk", is the Fat Bear Week champion of 2025, and I would like the record to reflect that I called it. Twelve hundred pounds. A scar across the muzzle. A broken jaw, still healing, with which this animal taught itself to eat salmon, because the salmon were not going to eat themselves and Chunk had a body to build. Eighty-two thousand nine hundred and thirteen people voted for him. The runner-up, 856, took seventy-six thousand and was, by any reasonable standard, also enormous, and lost anyway, because this is a contest about magnitude and Chunk had simply decided to be more.
Two years a runner-up. Two years. And he came back. With a broken jaw. And won.
The catalogue does not, as a rule, do feelings. The catalogue does girth, density, and the quiet authority of an object that has stopped asking permission to exist. But I direct the committee's attention to the photographs. That is not a bear that has had a good autumn. That is a bear that has concluded one. He is not fat. He is finished. He is a salmon-powered monument to the proposition that you can be broken and still occupy the entire frame.
The Senior Cataloguer has just walked past my desk and said the word "decorum." I have considered it.
The ruling: Thiccc. Entered under Megafauna, Triumphant, unanimous over my colleagues' objections to my tone. Chunk: the catalogue salutes you. 856: there is no shame in losing to a legend.
Spider Hennessy, who will be composing himself shortly.