Goodbye Bush

Chapter 80: Scorched Earth

2009-01-18T06:38:00.011-05:00

****
Can this really be the end? It seems like only yesterday, not September, that we embarked upon this odyssey together.

Well, it is the end both here and in Washington, D.C. At least, after reading this final instalment you won't have to worry about life imitating art. The real George W. isn't smart enough to emulate his fictional brother. He is slated to live a continued pointless life in his recently purchased, recently reduced-in-price 8500-square-foot split level in the Dallas suburbs.

May he re-discover the demon Rum. May Laura find a better man. May a plague of locusts descend upon his landscaping and may a swarm of locusts chomp away on his foundation. The man deserves nothing less.

As for our intrepid fictional characters and you, my most definitely non-fictional browsers, may you all live in peace. If you have time, drop me a line telling me what you thought about my literary endeavors.
****

After the Sheriff’s visit, the Captain and The Babe decided to stay overnight at the bisflats. They laid out sleeping bags next to a campfire.

It was a rare warm spring evening. The first flowers of the year scented the air with their perfume. The Hoot Owls announced their return upstate. The season’s first insects darted to and fro around the fire. Evenings like this produced a sense of contentment so intense and so similar in both the human and Avian minds that it must harken back to a common source in antediluvian times.

For the Captain it was a continuation of his recent camping experience up in Canada. The big difference was The Babe and the Birds were far better campfire companions than Big Al. They all lounged around the blaze, with the birds keeping a respectful distance because of the flying embers.

Lut was both fearful and fascinated about fire. He remembered his first year of migration flying over a wildfire on his way south. The updraft and smoke from the blaze forced him to take a long detour around it. It was twilight and the flames glowed orange on the horizon.

Sitting near the bislflats with the Captain and The Babe, he could now see how fire worked. He observed how the Captain gathered the tinder and wood, lit the match and watched in wonder as the small flame built itself into a roaring conflagration.

Lut was most impressed by how nonchalant human were around fire. They’d sit close to its edge, hold their hand out even closer to warm them, brush off sparks if they ever popped onto their clothes or even skin.

Yet he remembered that fire down south. He had heard about others that had gotten out of hand and burned huge tracts of land. What a remarkable phenomenon, fire could be, both your best friend and worst enemy.

The Babe was also enjoying herself; she was full of ideas about her institute.

“We could have courses on flying run by Swallows, how to prepare insects for sushi, ways in which the Five Precepts applied to the human world,” she rattled off one bright idea after another

“Is there any chance,” she asked the Captain, “of getting the Lord of the Black Flies down to teach? He must have some wonderful insights into inter-species behavior,” she said.

“Anything is possible,” the Captain said dreamily. He, too, would like to spend more time with the Lord. His Highness must have some fascinating tales to tell about life with the Black Flies.

The Captain was beginning to doze off. It certainly was not because of the conversation, which he found scintillating, but rather the early morning flight from Toronto, then the stress of the confrontation with the Sheriff. He was pooped.

A slumbering Captain Don heard the first warning just as Morpheus was wrapping him in his sweet embrace.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!” the Birds were crying out.

“Of course, there’s a fire,” Captain Don mumbled to himself. “For heaven’s sake, go to sleep. That’s where I’m headed.”

“Fire! Fire!” The Babe picked up the chant. That brought the Captain to his senses.

His eyes opened wide, he stared into the campfire. It seemed much the same as before, albeit a little more subdued than before. However, behind him, on the inland side of the facility, there was now an orange glow as well, evidence of a much larger blaze.

“Oh my God, the woods are on fire,” the now fully awake Captain exclaimed.

He roused himself from his prone position and rushed to the security gate, where he instructed the guards to call the fire department and assemble all the shovels and rakes they could find.

The Captain rushed out of the fenced enclosure, running towards the woods.

Several minutes ahead of him were The Babe, Lut, Nafi, Hala and many of the other Swallows. The Birds had fought back their natural instincts to flee and instead had rushed towards the fire.

Without their assistance, the Captain would never have been able to collar the culprit and douse the blaze.

By the time the Captain reached the edge of the woods, Big Al was lying on the ground, still armed with his quart-size canisters of propane fuel sputtering into the ground. Several scorched Swallows lay nearby, burned to a crisp by Big Al’s wild flaming propane flailings.

The rest of the group, including our intrepid trio, were perched all over his body, holding him to the ground. The Babe was standing to the side, her hair singed, armed with a shovel, ready to use it again if the man on the ground attempted to get up.

Big Al — “Guide Extraordinaire,” “wilier than a Fox,” “no animal big or ornery enough could scare him” — had been subdued by a flock of Swallows and a woman with a shovel.

“Wait until all those Wolverines in Algonquin Park hear about this,” Captain Don said with more than a trace of irony in his voice.

Big Al was petrified with fear. During his long career, he had confronted marauding Bears, angry Skunks, pissed-off Porcupines, Moose in musth, but none of them had been as tough and persistent a foe as these Swallows and woman whose home and future home were threatened.

Big Al had tried to scare them away with preemptive fake charges, but they kept coming. He had tried to frighten them off with yells, but they kept coming. He had tried to flame them away with his propane torch, but they kept coming. Nothing could stop these determined Swallows and enraged woman.

“I knew it all along,” the Captain said as he looked down in contempt at his former guide who lay at his feet trembling with fear, his face raw with scratches. He was whimpering like a new born babe.

“You’re nothing but a big bully,” the Captain said.

To place their own exclamation point on that proclamation, Lut and Nafi both dropped their load right there on the newly christened “Lil Al.”

Chapter 81: The War Peace Ceremony

2009-01-18T06:37:00.005-05:00

After the botched Sheriff’s raid and Big Al’s failed attempt at intimidation that had resulted in only a few acres lost to flames, it was clear the Swallow team couldn’t be stopped. Norman remained incoherent, bubbling and mumbling, Big Al was deported back to Canada with his tail between his legs and Lisa, as Norman’s live-in/stand-in lover/leader, was simply in over her head.

The act of proclaiming the Scourge of the Swallows conflict at an end fell to Norman’s still official next of kin, The Babe, whose divorce papers weren’t yet final.

A Swallows War Peace Ceremony was held outside the Squires’ Boathouse where the troubles had begun more than a year ago. Part of The Babe’s divorce settlement would cede the cottage and Boathouse to her. She planned to invite the Swallows back and to restrict the structure’s deed to prevent any use other than as a Bird sanctuary.

Pastor Bendiks Barons gave the Invocation. He appeared in a flowing cassock with a brilliant red sash around his waist. He looked more like a Roman Catholic Cardinal than the defrocked Lutheran minister he was. Many said Bendiks’ words sounded more like an incantation than a prayer because of all the references to thunder, sky and water.

Then The Babe stepped up to the platform on the beach and began, “Words fail me at moments like this. However, someone needs to note the folly of it all, so I will try.”

Listening to her was a mix of media folks and townspeople, but not either Norman or Lisa. Many Birds were on hand, including the by now famous trinity of Lut, Hala and Nafi. They were perched on the new railing running around the roof of the Boathouse. Many were wearing little light-weight black wingbands fashioned by The Babe to honor the Swallows who had been incinerated by Big Al.

The Babe had hired the Captain to quickly re-build the railing since Norman had ordered its destruction last year. She knew it would be a perfect roost, especially during fledgling season. The Swallows were flanked on both sides by representatives from many major Avian groups. Thanks to some preliminary contacts made by The Babe’s institute, a few fish even showed up, poking their heads above water offshore. The solitary Woodchuck and cantankerous Muskrat both made brief appearances — one at the side of the cottage where The Babe had placed some strawberries and Shredded Wheat to gain his confidence, the other at the rear of the Boathouse — to see what all the fuss was about. Neither was aware of how close they had come to feeling Norman’s wrath.

Curiously, Captain Don didn’t seem to be in attendance.

The Babe continued, “Wars usually begin with a bang, but end with little contemplation about their causes. No one wants to remember the deaths, waste and destruction of this war, but remember, we must,” she said.

“We paid for this calamity with our blood, sweat and money. Don’t let the tears cloud our vision. If we remember anything, let it be the many mistakes on both sides so we don’t repeat them again.”

She paused for effect and also to get her emotions under control. “When Norman Squires declared victory by having the Swallows carted off to the detention center for further testing, I stood with him. That shows you we all made mistakes.”

“I don’t think I was a bad person then, only an inattentive one. Far too many of us weren’t paying attention. Far too many of us were letting others do our thinking.”

“Why is that?” she asked. “Shouldn’t a sound educational system liberate us from relying on others? Yet, ours doesn’t. It seems designed to prevent us from discovering the truth.”

The crowd gave her a warm round of applause.

“Improving the educational system will be my mission for the rest of my life. As you know, I have started the Swallow-Human Co-existence Institute for Training, SHCIT. I hope that will inculcate this life-long love of learning into every human and …,” she paused to turn to the Birds on the Boathouse railing “… every animal beginning with these lovely creatures assembled here today.”

A cheer went up from the gathering. Many of the Birds fluttered their wings while continuing to perch in place.

Nafi beamed at Hala while Lut let out a loud chirp.

The Babe raised her arms to quiet the crowd. She didn’t want it to get out of control before the surprise grand finale she and the Captain had planned.

“Friends, we can learn a lot from each other. All of us, humans and animals, have developed slightly different ways to deal with the same environment. I don’t care if you wear a baseball cap like an American, a turban like an Arab, or a headcrest like a Cockatoo, it doesn’t matter.

“What does matter is that this variety represents opportunity. It allows us to consider all possibilities before deciding on any course of action,” she said. “And, should we ever make a mistake, we must be willing to declare our errors to the world.

“Owning up is like bowing down,” she said with a quiver in her voice.

“Asking forgiveness is the most sacred, soul cleansing act of any religion,” she proclaimed with her eyes swelling up with tears of joy.

The Babe raised her arms again, this time not to quiet the crowd but to signal the triumphant end to her speech. Binging her hands together above her head, palm on palm, in a prayerful gesture, she twisted her body at her neck and waist into a classic three-curve tribhanga posture. Slowly, she pivoted to the ground with her head hung in humiliation. All of this was her elegant way of bowing down for the mistakes she and her ex-husband had made.

The crowd gave her a standing ovation, many yelling out, “We love you; you are The Babe.”

Off to the side, an aide pulled out a cell phone, punched in a number and said, “We’re ready.”

After a few moments, faint music could be heard up the lakeshore. As the applause died down, people and Birds became aware of the approaching sound of stirring classical music.

From their perch on high, the Birds were the first to catch sight of Captain Don’s barge laden with a small symphony orchestra. All of them, the Captain included, were wearing tuxedoes for the men and black ball gowns for the women. From the bow, the conductor waved his baton at the string, woodwind, brass and percussion sections. The Captain stood to the rear, next to the drums with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a tambourine.

The orchestra was playing Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.” The Captain contributed to the soaring music along with the rest of the percussionists.

Nafi was thrilled, “Ohmigod, that’s Swallow soul music; that’s how we fly,” he said, referring to the frantic rush of sixteenth notes in the score. Even though he was wrong about the animal being celebrated in the music, Nafi’s heart was in the right place. He was exhibiting lots of inter-species, Bird and bee and human-composer awareness. Perhaps there was hope for his cross species bonding potential after all.

Behind the boat streamed the largest collection of Avians anyone had ever witnessed. There were Sea Gulls, a long time Captain Don favorite, whose good behavior after their outbreak of violence had returned them to the his good graces. Many local Birds joined them: Swallows, naturally, Kingfishers, Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers and a few escaped Canaries. Others rarely seen in these climes showed up: Pelicans, Parrots, Storks, an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, thought to be extinct until recently discovered by a local university. There was even a Whooping Crane who was escorted by a manned ultra light aircraft, a testament to humans’ commitment not to lose another of these rare Birds, less than 500 of which still existed in the wild.

The music was extraordinary. The Bumblebees gave way to Stravinsky’s “Fire Bird” which segued into Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain.” Yes, the Russian composers were much in evidence, but there was also a Captain Don favorite, “The Theme from Star Trek” by Courage, complete with a rare ondes martenot instrument to make the tune’s ethereal, swirly soprano sound. As the barge pulled into the beach by the Boathouse, the orchestra switched to a top-10 American band favorite, the national march, John Phillip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

No one even considered singing the composer’s official lyrics, even if they had known them, about “martial notes” and “freedom’s field and hopes.” No, this was a different day, with a different non-Rotarian crowd, with a different “Yes-We-Can” attitude. Everyone, including most of the Birds, automatically lapsed into the more familiar words of the march:

“Be kind to your web-footed friends
For a duck may be somebody's mother
Be kind to your friends in the swamp
Where the weather is very, very ‘domp’
Now, you may think that this is the end...
WELL, IT IS!”

At that propitious moment, Captain Don leaned back on his haunches and let out the loudest bellow he had ever uttered — yes, even louder than his greeting to the Lord of the Black Flies. Residents on the far shore claimed they were soon thereafter hit by a small tsunami.

Chapter 82: Media Reactions

2009-01-18T06:36:00.003-05:00

The media took notice of the peace, although in a much more subdued fashion than their coverage of the startup of hostilities. The New York Post ran a single-column story deep inside, with a redundant headline: “Bird Fray Unravels.”

Fox News declared the peace a victory for the evil Lord of the Black Flies. The network spent half its report congratulating itself for being the only news outlet to have provided advance information about the Dark One. The other half of the coverage was news the network was negotiating with the Lord himself for an exclusive Q & A session and a derogatory interview with Big Al in which Bill O’Reilly would constantly interrupt him. News of Al’s dastardly arsonist ways had become public and even Fox couldn’t abide such behavior, especially when the culprit was a Canadian torching American woodlands.

Fox teased its listeners all evening that it had discovered startling new developments in the case, which it finally revealed at 11 p.m. The news was about Norman’s middle name of “V.,” whose unabbreviated form he had always refused to disclose. Fox ballyhooed the fact “V” stood not for “Victory” or some other cool concept, but for “Vaughan.” That meant “little” in Welsh. His father had used it to reflect Norman’s junior status to himself. The network now revealed it to literally “belittle” its former hero. Such was the spiteful demeanor of this media giant. Before never mentioning him ever again, the network sent Norman to their version of hell to languish with Big Al and former 43rd President George W. in the Fox “Hall of Shame.”

Rush Limbaugh, coughing into his sleeve, began his radio report by saying he would not mention all the Russian music in evidence at the ceremony, then said, “See, I told you the liberals were going to let these commie Birds spread Avian Flu everywhere. God help us.” Then, he promptly forgot about the whole Swallows affair and set out to find new windmills against which he could tilt.

CBS, NBC and ABC used a pool camera service to save money for their ailing news divisions. All of them cut the 30 minutes of tape provided to 10 seconds in one instance, but no more than 30 seconds for the other two.

The F.B.I. was on hand filming the participants. No one could figure out why.

J.P. Winslow did not dispatch a VNR news team to cover the event because Norman was no longer paying the way.

Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a disheveled Norman V. Squires, wearing just a burp bib and diaper, as a pooh-stained bronze statue in a public park. Birds were sitting all over his head and shoulders. One Bird turns to the other and says, “Do you suppose this guy did anything else in life besides provide us someplace to perch?”

Perhaps the most comprehensive coverage came from the British Broadcasting Company World Service. With no commercials, it had no sponsors to worry about offending. It only had to please its 180 million listeners tuned in to its 73 language services.

Local Channel 21 Eyewitness News gave the ceremony extensive coverage. The new, wet-behind-the-ears reporter — a dead ringer for Lisa Norstrom, who had been fired several months before when her dual affiliations were discovered — gushed at the historic nature of the ceremony. However, her mention of the role of Rotary in the conflict was stricken by her editor. She did manage to persuade him to retain the fact Lisa had once been an employee of the station.

The Hoover Institute at Stanford University, a right-wing think tank, announced it would create a task force to study the Swallows War. The Institute, which had hired former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to study the second Iraq War, said it would look into such issues as terrorism, honor and duty. Its goal, as always, was to prepare America to meet future threats to its way of life and its world hegemony.

Parker Brothers, a subsidiary of Hasbro Inc, the nation’s second largest toymaker, announced the introduction of a new game called “Poop®.” Similar to its best-selling “Monopoly®,” the purpose was to roll dice and move Swallow game pieces of different colors around a board. Each player received six small “Birdpats of Poop®,” which, tiddlywink-like, must be popped into the air by the Swallow game pieces, which doubled as squidgers, or launchers. Points were awarded for any Pats that landed in a mahogany-colored, Chris Craft-look-alike container, called the “Norman®.” It was placed in an outlined area in the middle of the board, which was informally known as the “Boathouse.” Landing on certain squares could award or take away Birdpats; others would send you to jail or, worst of all, to Canada. Players must leave the game when they were “Too Pooped to Pop®,’ meaning they had exhausted their Birdpats of Poop®.

The New York Times, as the nation’s paper of record, devoted almost 50 column-inches of space below the front-page fold to the conflict. The article quoted The Babe’s denunciation of the American educational system, but concluded that was an especially difficult problem, probably best left to be dealt with in other forums. The Times did elaborate on The Babe’s point that many people wanted to forget war, especially an unpopular conflict like this one. The newspaper said polls showed the majority of Americans had already dismissed it from their minds or couldn’t remember it in the first place.

The article pointed out that unintended consequences were often the most interesting details to emerge at the end of many wars. The Spanish-American War, begun to free Cubans and Filipinos, resulted in their subjugation by the victors. The American Civil War, begun partly to end slavery in the South, led to almost 100 years of segregation there as well as in the victorious North. The Second Iraq War, designed to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, ended in the diminution of the attacking nation and the strengthening of a neighboring nation, which very likely had dangerous weapons of mass destruction that did exist.

The article concluded by saying it was still too early to see what the consequences of the Swallows War would be.

A sidebar discussed the fate of Norman Vaughan Squires. It perceptively summed up the man whom it deemed “smaller than life.” It detailed how the brilliant J.P. Winslow had briefly turned a used car salesman into a national hero. Norman’s numerous verbal gaffes were recounted but dismissed as not indicative of any mental failings, just “a loose lip worried about sinking ships.”

The man of the hour, the article concluded, was a hometown hero, one of New York City’s former finest, Captain Don, who had never risen above the rank of Sergeant while on the police force, but whose “street smarts” were apparently more than enough to overcome the upstate bumpkin and Washington flack know-it-all. Overlooked, as usual, were the real heroes, the Swallows, who in the paper’s mind couldn’t make news nor purchase advertising. All they could do was suffer the consequences of a simple-minded man who, while wallowing in self pity, would claim in the end he was ruined by “intelligence failures” of all sorts, except his own.

Chapter 83: That Dreadful Day After

2009-01-18T06:35:00.009-05:00

Looking back on the War Peace Ceremony it could be seen now to have been the calm before the storm. Equality and justice seemed to have prevailed. Both sides in the bitter dispute seemed reconciled to letting bygones be bygones. Hopes for a bright new world seemed justified.

No one, especially Captain Don, could have suspected he was living out the final day of his brilliant halcyon career. As for Norman V. Squires, he didn’t have a childhood sled like Charles Foster Kane, nor a Crawford, Texas ranch like good ol’ Dubya to fall back upon. Norman’s only place of refuge was his Chris Craft mahogany runabout. That was where he was destined to spend his last sane moments on Earth.

These two men, who shared a love of boats, an upstate lake and strong opinions about Birds, one fair-minded, the other foul, shared a last beautiful morning together. It was the day after the peace ceremony, emotions still ran high. Where else would you be, but out on the water? That was where the Captain spotted Norman around 7:30 a.m. as the Chris Craft approached his barge at a fast clip. The Captain’s heart was as full of forgiveness this morning as Norman’s was hindered by hate. Yesterday’s classical uplifting melodies still echoed through Captain Don’s head while Norman hummed along to a Hitler favorite, The Badenweiler Marsch.

The Captain would never forget the thrill of ferrying that orchestra to the beach. The ode to joy reflected on humans’ and Birds’ faces, the regal elegance of the assembled plumage, the wonder of hearing the world’s first and finest musicians, the Birds, mingle their warbles with human voices in a chorus of love and hope that was indelibly embedded in his mind. Norman, by contrast, was contemplating the end of the world.

Norman’s boat, “Sweetie Pie,” pulled up alongside the Captain’s “Pile Driver.” “Permission to come aboard,” Norman yelled out pleasantly enough.

The Captain suddenly realized he hadn’t spoken to his former foe since that winter season when he had worked on his Boathouse. Time can heal most wounds and the Captain was in a forgiving mood after yesterday’s festivities.

“Sure, come aboard,” he said, accepting Norman’s bow line which he attached to his cleat. He even extended his hand to pull Norman up the foot difference in the two boats’ heights.

“Mind the gap,” Captain Don said, using the British term for boarding the underground in London. Little did he know, today, the important gap was in Norman's mind.

Even though he was deeply disturbed, Norman managed to look pleased with the warm welcome. He hadn’t known what kind of reception he was going to receive, so had prepared for all possibilities.

On his face, he had plastered a false smile; in his back pocket, he had holstered a handgun.

When the smile waned, he would wave the weapon.

“Nice day,” Norman said, making a wide gesture with his arms.

It was only through an extraordinary exertion of willpower that Norman was able to pull off this display of normalcy. Up until two hours ago, he had been babbling and bubbling away incomprehensibly. He still wore the burp bib with “I Coo and Pooh, That’s All I Do” embroidered on it. That should have been a dead giveaway that something was amiss, but the Captain was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and guess he had merely overlooked removing it.

“It sure is a nice day,” the Captain readily agreed. “What brings you out here?”

“I had to move my boat to a new mooring,” Norman lied. Actually, thanks to a court order, a Sheriff’s deputy had moved the boat two days ago. This morning, Norman had snuck out of the rented cottage where both he and his boat were being institutionalized, leaving behind a sleeping Lisa and a nurse who had forgotten to give him his tranquilizer and OxyContin last night. Lisa had asked the doctor for the painkiller so Norman could share something with his hero, Rush Limbaugh.

The Captain was a bit surprised. Yesterday, he had correctly assumed the boat had already been moved. He waited for Norman to explain his sudden impulse to pay him a visit.

That was also strange; Norman premeditated everything. None of his actions were ever “sudden.” That way he would make no mistakes and never have to change his mind.

This morning’s actions had long been festering in Norman’s troubled mind. “A million Maggots” and “Kill Captain Don” had competed for his attention every minute of the last 48 hours. His presence on board the Captain’s barge showed he couldn’t do anything about the Maggots, but sure could about the Captain.

Ironically, both men’s attentions were diverted by a couple of pesky Black Flies.

“Damn Flies,” Norman said, swatting about his face, a gesture that accomplished little but to infuriate the Flies. Captain Don looked on serenely, more composed than his visitor. He still had some paternal feelings for the little buggers he had airlifted out of Canada. When they got too bothersome, the Captain did the humane thing and donned a Netsuit he had purchased up North.

“What can I do for you?” the Captain finally said to break the silence.

Norman’s pleasant smile dissolved into a sinister grin; a bubble formed at his mouth. He looked a lot like Uday Sadam Hussein al-Tikriti, the evil son of the Iraqi dictator.

“It’s a little late to be asking me that,” he said. “You’ve had your chances. Then you stole my Babe and made me a laughing stock of everyone and now look at me I babble all the time….” Norman said, his voice trailing off at the end like he didn’t know what to do next.

“Look here,” Captain Don said, “you started this whole mess.”

Norman actually did know what to do next. Now that his smile was gone, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out his gun.

“Here’s Johnny!” he said, mimicking Jack Nicholson in his famous scene in the movie, The Shining, when he pokes his head through the ax-battered bathroom door to harangue his frightened wife with Ed McMahon’s famous greeting to Johnny Carson. Norman did not go to the movies. He had caught this scene once at the Mall when the local Blockbuster had screened it in its storefront window. The fact that it was totally inappropriate for this morning’s setting was lost on Norman. He didn’t watch TV either, so he didn’t know that much about the late night shows either.

The Captain was shocked to be looking into the eyes of a madman and down the barrel of his gun. In his mind, he was taken back to the streets of the city where he had faced such life-threatening situations before. The only problem was he had no back-up support out here in the middle of the lake.

Norman motioned for him to jump onto the Chris Craft. Norman followed after him with a surprisingly spry leap. Norman was feeling the restorative effects of his surging testosterone. So much of the hormone was pulsing in his veins that a six-lane freeway had to be built between his testicles and brain. He felt happy, realizing he was only moments away from fulfilling his fondest dream: he was going to rid himself of his arch nemesis.

“So long, Captain Don, we should do this more often,” he said with a crazy laugh as he tied the other man’s hands to a rope he had secured to the stern of his boat and forced the Captain to jump overboard. He started up his Chris Craft and pulled away from the barge.

The Captain floundered in the water, flailed behind the powerful Chris Craft. He vainly tried to keep his head above water as Norman, laughing wildly, steered his boat in ever widening circles around the lake. By Jove, in Norman’s addled mind, he was mighty Achilles towing the fallen Hector behind his chariot.

The Captain’s last words were a futile call for his only possible savior at this late moment. “Lut!!!!” he yelled, “Lut!!!” but to no avail. On any other day, the Swallows and Gulls, or any of his many Bird friends, would have been out and about and might have flown to the Captain’s rescue. Not today, they were still sleeping off the excesses of yesterday’s War Peace Ceremony.

Norman continued to haul the body all over the lake long after it was necessary. His last sane moment of clarity had vanished. For Norman, the prolonged flailing of the body represented the triumphant procession, the ticker tape parade that he had never received from the grateful nation for his glorious victory in the Swallows War.

For the last time in his life, he felt good.

With this savage attack, Norman Vaughan Squires joined James Earl Ray, Mark David Chapman and George Walker Bush to form the quartet of the “Three-Name Killers” who have deprived our country of those we value most (Author’s Note: There’s never been a killer with four-names like the author).

You just know wherever the Captain now resides, he is enjoying one of his grandest Zen moments as he punts on a placid pond, accompanied by Brother Martin, the Black man with a dream, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and soldiers killed in that silly war and John Lennon, with his guitar, who is trying to “Imagine there's no heaven /It's easy if you try /No hell below us /Above us only sky.”

Meanwhile, somewhere else, a lot hotter, Norman has joined his brothers in crime — James, Mark and George — in their Sisyphean quest to scrape all the world’s excrement into ever neater, ever higher piles of shit.

This certainly was an inopportune and disagreeable way for Captain Don to die. He had so much to live for; he had so many plans for the future, so many more moments of Zen to share with his fellow men and animals. The only consolation was that, at least, his final resting place was in the liquid embrace of the one element he loved so much. After his funeral, his friends decided to return his body to where it was found that horrible morning: at the bottom of the lake, weighted down by Norman’s Chris-Craft anchor and by the Captain’s struggles to save the Birds he loved so much. Hermes, usually the messenger from the heavens, reversed his role to honor this mortal. With his winged shoes and rod, he conveyed Captain Don’s soul to the gods on high.

Chapter 84: Epilogue

2009-01-18T06:34:00.009-05:00

Captain Don’s death is the most momentous development since the war ended three years ago. Gone too are Lut, Hala and Nafi. Such are the vicissitudes of existence. The three Swallows lived out their natural life spans; Captain Don did not.

Lut and Nafi died during a migration north. One can assume the two were listening to their inner music, pushing themselves hard to be among the first to arrive at the Boathouse. Their hearts gave out near a nondescript exit off Interstate 95 in South Carolina. A waitress from the local Waffle House found them. Saying a little prayer, she wrapped their tiny bodies in maple-syrup-stained placemats before tossing them in a dumpster. Hala died that same spring. Some say she expired of a broken heart, having learned only the week before that both Lut and Nafi hadn’t completed the migration north.

The Captain’s death touched the hearts of many people and Birds. His casket was borne on his barge around the lake with The Babe at the helm. His body was later re-interred in the lake, sunk again to the bottom by Norman’s anchor. The cortège was almost a quarter mile long if you counted all the Birds trailing off the stern. People lined the shore to witness the procession. Many of them whooped as loud as they could to honor the fallen warrior. Needless to say, none of their yells even rippled the lake’s calm surface.

The massive manhunt for Captain Don’s murderer, Norman Vaughan Squires, shut down the entire upstate area for weeks as everyone took off from work or played hooky from school. Many Birds joined in, providing valuable aerial surveillance as well as ground coverage of the more remote areas. That was where a pair of sharp-eyed Grouse found Norman huddled in a hole in the woods.

The judge who sentenced Norman to life imprisonment was himself a Rotarian. He had attended that very luncheon session in which Norman had made his denunciations of the Swallows. He was a fellow boat owner and had been on Norman’s original steering committee to contain the Swallows. He had once come close to, as the kid’s say, “hooking up” with Lisa Norstrom. During sentencing, he smiled at her sitting in the courtroom, but frowned at Norman, reprimanding him for the dastardly way he had killed the Captain.

“Premeditated murder is bad enough, even though your outrage was understandable,” the Judge said from the bench. “But to subject your fine old Chris Craft to such stress by tying the victim behind and tweaking the boat’s frame by flailing the body as long as you did is reprehensible.” Ownership of the Chris Craft reverted to The Babe who still motors about the lake in it today.

Norman is currently serving a life sentence at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Since he was already upstate, “He was sold down the river!” as Norman’s few remaining supporters, all three of them, liked to say. Little is known about his existence there, but it can be assumed he won’t be following in the footsteps of another famous federal prisoner, Charles Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz.”

Thanks to numerous books like this one and others that have detailed the Swallow’s dramatic story, many of the characters, fictional and not, have become staples of the popular imagination.

The Babe, in her acclaimed study of the war, cites some of these as examples of why Norman failed. “While it certainly helps to have big dumb guys like Angler the Perch to do your dirty work, clever tacticians like Ferdie the Firefly to run your daily affairs, supposed strategists like Rummy the Fiddler Crab to plan your operations and self-serving commentators like the Zebra Mussels to comment on everything — they are not enough.”

“True freedom fighters, like Captain Don and the Swallows, will always prevail when up against people like Norman V. Squires, who is not too smart and is simply trying hard to avoid failure, and J.P. Winslow, who is squeezing truth, like lemons, into his tart version of how things should be. Only by zealously pursuing total mobilization of your forces and seeking annihilation of the enemy, something difficult to do in a democracy, can you achieve victory. Even then, you’ve got to be darn lucky as well.”

J.P Winslow’s doctors, by the way, report he is doing a little better. His demented visions of grandeur have subdued to a point where his chiaroscuro view of the world has been replaced by a gray palette. Some days, he is almost coherent. Doctors believe he eventually will be able to re-enter society, but probably never practice public relations again.

The original Boathouse remains a Swallow sanctuary. Lut’s, Hala’s and Nafi’s nest enjoys a prominent spot on the wall where it is still used by some of their descendants. One branch of the family moved there while the other remained at SCRWU. Captain Don’s plaque marking Mooring Number One remained at the bisflats wall even though Lut’s childhood nest was moved back to the Boathouse in a special ceremony attended by the new President and other dignitaries. CNN and Fox were both there, live. The Birds have vowed to maintain the nest by diligently patrolling for mites and by laminating the sides with their collective saliva. However, when it does fall of the wall, which it ultimately will, it will be allowed to sink to the bottom of the lake. Unlike humans, Swallows know everything has a natural cycle. To mis-quote a long-time closet Trans Species-ist, Yogi Berra, “’It’s over when it's over.”

The Sheriff ran for and won re-election. Voters appreciated his restraint in dealing with the Swallows after they were let out of jail. Of late, he has been seen frequently in the company of Lisa Norstrom. Rumors are rife about their intentions. She has intimated to friends she wouldn’t mind an upgrade in her “gravitas” by being called “Mrs. Sheriff” if she ever does tie the knot.

To honor the Captain, The Babe renamed her institute after him: The Captain Don Institute for Human-Animal Co-Existence (CDIHAC). The Babe thought it was just as well that the new acronym lacked the zing of the former because the old one was an attractive nuisance.

“Kids were forever stealing the old “SHCIT” signs,” she explained.

The Institute’s long-term survival has been ensured thanks to a generous grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which, having eradicated malaria, has now vowed to eliminate “all inter-species disharmony” in the world.

Some of Gates’ money was used to augment funds pledged by public subscription drives to construct the award-winning Institute buildings near the SCRWU facility. There architect Frank Gehry created one of his outstanding “deconstructivist” buildings. This one evokes images of his titanium-clad Bilbao museum, but demands its own identity with a set of wing-like roof structures appended to its barge-like lower floors. To honor the Captain, the words “Pile Driver,” four feet high, are inscribed on the building’s stern.

The building features the world’s first Wiccan Human-Animal Church, presided over by Pastor Bendiks Barons who resigned his post at the Lutheran Church.

“Who was I kidding? I’ve always been drawn to the natural pagan world. Luther and Bach are yesterday’s news and my Lutheran parishioners were straight out of The Saturday Evening Post. Nothing against Norman Rockwell, but I’d rather hang with “illiterati,” like the Swallows. They really appreciate my music,” he said.

Babe used what was left of Mrs. Stavros’ million-dollar donation to purchase the failing Bird and Shotgun museum, whose attendance had dwindled when it was removed from the AAA list of recommended attractions due to pressure from Bird lovers. Babe moved it out to her institute, re-wrote its mission to be more Bird-friendly and less dead-Bird oriented and it soon regained its popularity with both the auto association and tourists.

The shotgun is now portrayed in the museum along the lines of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic as one of the greatest killers in history. Its status as “collateral damage-proof” is mentioned in the exhibit, but only as an example of the militaristic rantings that used to dominate the country. All things related to the military have taken a decided downward spin in the public’s mind, just like the lull after the Viet Nam War that lasted until the start of the next great American misadventure abroad.

In the lobby of the institute is housed Norman V. Squires’ Handy Dandy Planner Notebook behind bulletproof glass. Each night, an ingenious pulley system lowers it to a fireproof vault below ground for protection. Each morning, as it is being brought up, an articulated arm flip flops it to a new page to reveal yet another one of his whacky ideas. Witnessing this “tricky” bit of engineering has become almost as popular as reading its entries Visiting classes of school kids are advised to start with the notebok, so that, as with a good speech, their tour can begin with a few good laughs.

The Captain Don Institute’s current lineup of courses features the popular “To Bee or Not to Bee,” a seminar for humans who want to examine the limits of exploring their social sides.

There’s also “The Raw and the Cooked,” a new look at Claude Levi Strauss’ classic theory in light of insights provided by the Birds’ diets. In a similar vein, “Insect Sushi” provides practical tips on how to enjoy that perennially classic cuisine.

Dr. Cleodis T. Cunningham has started a summer symposium at the institute for the world’s leading biologists. They are searching for ways to take the wallop out of the Black Flies’ bite. Even though they consult Dr. Jarda Jirasek on a regular basis on how to maintain the “integrity” of the Black Fly’s genome coding, there are persistent rumors about a possible blow up between the two groups.

Lisa Norstrom’s “Birdbrain Ideas” class always reaches its quota early with a look at seemingly “crazy ideas” that good public relations has sold.

The Lord of the Black Flies continues to pack them in with a number of courses in his Department of Trans Species Studies. He is also a hugely popular after-dinner speaker on the banquet circuit.

Two of Lut’s offspring have taken over his “Swallow Flying Techniques” course, always a good draw for the younger Avian and human Jet Set.

“Twice Told ‘Tails’ ” teaches storytelling skills for females of all species. Originated by Hala before her death, it is currently seeking a replacement teacher.

Up north, Canadian officials have cut a new road into Algonquin Park and renovated the Lord of the Black Fly’s house. For the sake of re-creating the most convenient viewing experience for the most people, the dioramas that depict the Lord’s efforts have been rendered as if he worked fulltime above ground in the house. A small placard near the entrance apologizes for the historical inaccuracy of the displays.

Rumors have it an underground boat ride, á la Disney World’s “Pirates of the Caribbean,” is planned in the Lord’s actual former underground lair in the near future. It will reportedly be called “Journey on the River Styx” even though that theme has nothing at all to do with the Lord of the Black Flies. Recent advances in animatronics have allowed ever smaller robotic creatures. This ride will feature electronic, non-biting Black Flies instead of Lightning Bugs.

The Lord has moved his actual operations south to the upstate area where he has become head of the Department of Trans Species Studies at The Babe’s Institute. Besides finding a cure for cancer with his updated Maggot therapy, he has successfully bred a “Flosquito.”

Unfortunately for the Lord and the insect, but just as well for everyone else, except the Birds, it has proven to be too delectable for its own good. Plans are to cross breed it with a Stinkbug to improve its longevity.

Big Al, proving scoundrels sometimes succeed, was awarded the concession to run the Lord’s Algonquin house despite a long letter from The Babe that detailed his role in starting the wildfire outside her institute and requesting he not be rewarded for his actions. The Canuck Minister of the Interior denied her request by saying he had read a pre-publication copy of The Boathouse and did not appreciate its many scurrilous remarks about Canada. He also upbraided the Babe for suggesting Americans wear a Canadian flag on their backpack trips through Europe. “While that isn’t necessarily illegal, it certainly would be unethical and could subject Canadians to terror best reserved for Americans alone,” he wrote. “Don’t expect any help at our European consulates.”

Every summer, Big Al regales hundred of thousands of visitors to the Algonquin house with stories about the Captain’s and his heroic confrontation with the Lord. On weekend evenings, he entertains many more with his “Canoe Antics” followed by stories told around the campfire. He never tells tales, tall or short, about Swallows. In fact, he has never mentioned them ever again.

The toxic fiberfill in the Swallows’ Simul Nests created a mutation in Hala’s first brood of her last productive year. Two of her chicks were born with a distinctive hue, a kandy-kolored, tangerine-flaked coat of feathers. Since they were presumed not to be Lut’s creations, these psychedelic aberrations and their subsequent similarly colored offspring became known throughout the Swallow world as “Nafi’s Kids.”

The New York Times still has to pronounce judgment on the consequences of the War of the Swallows. Some historians, however, are already routinely referring to it as the “dumbest” war ever. J.P. Winslow, if he were coherent, would certainly argue with that characterization. Even with the boss unavailable for consultation, J.P.’s old firm is still waging a number of dumb conflicts elsewhere. “We have to stay involved,” a spokesperson.said. “People don’t know how to start wars on their own anymore.”

J.P.’s embedded “Young Jornos” did win an Emmy for “Outstanding Reality Competition, Handheld Cinematography,” but since it was in the “Creative Arts,” not “Primetime” category, J.P.’s spokesperson never got to accept the award on TV. Some Internet sites said rumors about the Jornos’ Swallow egg-eating experiment had led to the lesser award.

Black Flies continue to plague the upstate region. People complain all the time about them. Some even use the Captain’s name as an expletive when they are beset by an especially large number of Flies.

“Captain Don it, Captain Don it!” they curse.

It is instructive to note that most people never swear that way in polite company or around children. Of late, savvy teenagers have begun to use the expression “Hot Don!” when they see an attractive person or an object they admire. Norman V. Squires, on the other hand, has become a term of derision, uttered whenever someone tries to do something especially stupid.

Finally, the existence of what was long assumed to be mythical, the Fab Five Swallows, has been confirmed on camera. The video of the ethereal five white Swallows emerging from the mist was captured by a production company headed by Lisa Norstrom. In her narration voiceover, she exclaims, in a voice laced with Charlton-Heston sincerity, that the largest of them all, the Grand Preordinator, bears a striking resemblance to our very own Lut. Coming from such an unimpeachable authority as Lisa, you just gotta’ believe it’s true.

The End

Chapter 75: Strapping Maggots on Backs

2009-01-11T06:59:00.024-05:00

The Canadian Geese landed in the same precise wedge-formations they had flown the many hundreds of miles from their upstate home. One by one, they glided to a stop on the calm Canoe Lake. With the tourists still away and Mother’s Day, when the Black Fly season would begin, still a week off, the Lord had risked bringing his Maggots down close to the park headquarters.

Geese sure knew how to fly long distances.

The ones at the tip of each V-formation provided uplift for those in the rear, increasing their flight range up to 70 percent. All the honking was encouragement from those in the rear to those in front to keep going. Leaders rotated throughout the journey, moving backwards to rest in flight. Should any Goose develop a sore throat from too exuberant honking or a weak wing from too excessive flapping, and have to temporarily drop out, two others always accompanied it down to stand guard while on the ground.

Big Al’s trigger finger was itching with delight at the sight of so many fat, succulent butter balls. There were enough to last him a lifetime of Boxing Day Goose dinners. Only the fact he had not yet been paid by the Captain for services rendered prevented him from taking a few pot shots.

The Captain was happy for a different reason. He was relieved so many of his transport brigade had made the trip. Reinforcements were landing by the minute. The more flamboyant flocks first made a wide sweep of the lake, wheeled and then dove to a smooth landing. These antics set off a honking hootenanny by those already in the water.

Geese sure knew how to have fun.

On shore, the proud “poppa,” the Lord of the Black Flies, sporting a pair of sunglasses borrowed from the Captain to ward off the midday sun, looked on, like a dapper Don, as his offspring were readied for shipment. He was a big booster of the amazing properties of the larval stage of Flies. Maggots ate only dead tissue, a most fortunate attribute for cleansing wounds in any animal. At The Babe’s urging, the Lord would eventually found a whole new branch of medicine that would lead to the eradication of cancer.

The logistics of strapping a million Maggots to the backs of God knows how many Geese was daunting, to say the least.

The Babe described this tremendous undertaking in her treatise on war. “There was so much to calculate and so little to reference. How much did a Maggot weigh? How much could a Goose transport? How much more could a Gander carry than a Hen?” She went on to list a host of other incredibly difficult considerations.

“This was research of the most basic kind,” she wrote. “Most of the decisions made by the Captain on that desolate Canadian lake would set the standard for years to come.”

The Babe compared the Maggot Airlift with other great materiel movements of the past, like the American Lend-Lease deals with Great Britain and Russia in World War II, the Berlin Airlift at the outset of the Cold War, and the Second Iraq invasion in 2003 (but not the mismanaged pullout decades later).

While lauding the Captain for his organizing efforts, she assigned much of the credit to the Geese themselves. “Not only did they have to fly hundreds of miles with cumbersome knapsacks on their backs, but they had to do it while conveying squirmy, gooey living things,” she wrote.

The Babe couldn’t help but drift off course for a short aside. “Had Swallows been big enough to carry the weight, they easily could have handled the Maggots. Then, the problem would have been too much attraction, not revulsion, to the cargo. Unscheduled lunch breaks with one Swallow lightening the load of another by eating the contents of his pack could have been a major stumbling block,” she wrote.

“The Geese had precisely the opposite problem,” she said. “As herbivores, they could barely countenance carrying these grotesque, in their eyes, at least, creatures on their backs. More than one Goose that day had to be calmed when they were initially loaded up. The unrelenting wriggling of the Maggots and their reputation for being parasitic were just too, too disconcerting. Many Geese were so upset it took them three or four attempts to get off the ground,” The Babe wrote.

“Once airborne, the Maggots didn’t have enough sense to settle down. Geese were anal retentive anyway. Even when not carrying cargo, they always religiously defecated before taking off and assiduously strove to maintain a proper trim while in flight,” The Babe wrote.

‘Now, with the added burden of Maggots, the Geese’s precise V–formation devolved into a scrawled series of ‘Ws’ as each honker struggled with the wriggling mass on its back. This was embarrassing for the usually punctilious Geese,” The Babe wrote.

By the end of the day, all the Maggots had been dispatched south. The Captain bid the Lord farewell and he headed off with Big Al for a short paddle back to his car and an eventual flight to the upstate area. There, he would meet with the Geese and arrange for the dispersal of the Maggots.

Taking his leave, the Captain thanked Big Al for all his efforts, paid him — even reluctantly tipping him despite all the trouble he had caused — and politely promised to meet again.

“We definitely haven’t seen the last of each other, ehhh?,” Big Al said in parting.

Chapter 76: Tap-Dancing Homunculus

2009-01-11T06:58:00.007-05:00

“Norman, that ‘Capistranian’ guy is here,” Lisa whispered in his slumbering ear. Norman’s head was still spinning because he had been watching Fox News before falling asleep on the couch.

Norman’s grogginess made him think Lisa had said, “The Captain.”

“You dunderhead,” he shouted out, half asleep.

“Hold on, partner,” Big Al said. “You don’t even know me, ehhh?”

Norman glared at Lisa and apologized to the Canadian.

Lisa tried to calm Norman down. He never liked to be abruptly awakened. “Norman, Al here…”

“Call me ‘Big Al’,” Big Al interrupted her.

“All right,” Lisa said. “Big Al has driven all night to be here this morning.”

Norman was still waking up and didn’t know what to think. “Where did you come from. Mr. Big Al?” he asked.

“Call me just ‘Big Al.’ I came from Algonquin Park. That’s in Canada,” he said.

“Oh, you’re Canadian?” Lisa said defensively. Like her fellow Americans, she didn’t know much about that breed of people, except their capital city was in Toronto, or some place like that.

“Yesterday, I saw the Captain load a million Maggots on the backs of thousands of Geese to be shipped down here,” Big Al said.

Norman looked puzzled, “What should I do about that?” he said.

Big Al was disappointed. Perhaps the Captain had rated his opponent too highly. “What should you do?” Big Al said, more as a statement than a question. “What should you do,” he said again for emphasis.

“If it was me, I’d make sure he didn’t broadcast those Maggots all over the place. If he does, you’re going to be doing a whole lot of swatting,” Big Al said.

Lisa had returned with a cup of coffee for their visitor. She had heard most of what he said.

“What are we going to do about it, dear?” she said to Norman.

Big Al sat across from Norman and, balancing the coffee cup on his knee, was looking expectantly at him.

Norman was stunned by the news. He felt 10 times worse than last year when that Bird had defecated all over his boat. First, a sneak attack from the sky; now, a nasty ground incursion. His head hurt.

The lines from an old Alka Seltzer commercial inexplicably effervesced in his head. “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Oh, what a relief it is.”

Over and over again.

“Dear, what’s wrong!” Lisa exclaimed. “You look awful. You’re frothing at the mouth.”

Norman just stared straight ahead. He, alone, knew the homunculus Speedy Alka Seltzer was tap dancing on his teeth. His mind had snapped and he had reverted to a long forgotten but suddenly vivid scene from his childhood at bedtime. He could hear Speedy’s high squeaky voice singing the commercial on his family’s DuMont TV Set in the downstairs living room as his Scottish grandfather tucked him in by reciting the poet, Bobbie Burns, “/The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men /Gang aft a-gley.”

Norman’s plans had indeed gone astray. And the reason was “A million Maggots,” he repeated over and over again, while his brain dissolved, like a giant bi-carbonate tablet, into bubbles that flowed from his mouth and cascaded off his chin. It was a classic case of catatonic stupor abetted by echolalia, all attributable to a surfeit of Alka Seltzer commercials as a youth.

Big Al had forgotten about his coffee for the time being. He was kneeling at Norman’s side, like a hunter examining his fallen prey.

“I’ve seen lots of animals play dead like this,” Big Al said. “It’s their response to some overwhelming situation. They’ve lost control of everything and playing possum is all they can do,” he said.

“But, in my whole cotton-picking hunting and trapping life, I’ve never seen anything like this foaming of the mouth,” he added. “Do you suppose he’s rabid?”

“Oh my,” was all Lisa could say.

An hour later, she temporarily, she mistakenly thought, assumed control of the S.O.B. campaign. With Big Al standing by, she called J.P. to figure out what to do next.

Chapter 77: Distributing the Load

2009-01-11T06:57:00.003-05:00

The day after leaving Canada, the Geese were home again. The lagoon in front of the SCRWU facility was filled with Birds of every kind. Word had gone out to the local Avian community about the incoming cargo and the need to redistribute the 1oad.

Lut was stage center. He flew back and forth trying to instill a little order in the wild Avian menagerie.

“Hey, you Hummingbirds, stop skittering all over the place. I know you’re eager to get started, but be patient,” Lut pleaded.

He wasn’t sure the Hummers could do much good anyways because each one, with a mighty effort, could heft only one Maggot.

Lut had more confidence in the bigger Sea Gulls, Hawks and their fellow raptors. They were languidly circling overhead, surveying the confusion below.

“Why are you big guys staying so high?” Lut flew up to ask them. They cringed as he neared them.

It turned out they felt vulnerable at lower elevations to attacks from smaller, more mobile Birds. It took repeated assurances from Lut, some Sparrows and a few Black-Capped Chickadees to persuade them to descend when it was time to pick up their allotment of Maggots.

In the middle of it all rested the Canadian Geese floating on the water after their long journey. Most still carried their knapsack load of Maggots on their backs. In a case of what’s good for the Goose, but not for the Gander, some of the female Geese had grown a little maternal about their load, but they all, male and female, were looking forward to being relieved of their burden. They were tres fatigue.

Captain Don had arrived on the morning flight from Toronto. He had just enough time to greet Lut and The Babe, who had showed up to help, before launching into the next phase of the operation. He knew time was of the essence.

His greatest concern was the safety of the Maggots. Too many of the assembled Birds were insectivores not to be worried.

“Please resist the temptation to gobble up this tiny larvae?” Captain Don counseled everyone, holding one of the Maggots aloft. “The plan is to plant them so they grow into juicy Flies.” He left out the bit about their biting and blood sucking, so as not to alarm anyone.

The Birds seemed to understand. Ever since Norman had launched his crazy war on the Swallows, most Birds had banded together in ways impossible to fathom before.

For example, Owls had woken up early to attend this gathering. Eagles had sworn off assaulting smaller Birds for the duration. Blue Jays had vowed to cease their aggressive behavior and petty thievery. Cowbirds had agreed to suspend their anti-social habit of planting their egg in other Birds’ nests. Even though there was scarcely a rock n’ roll musician in sight, this gathering would one day be likened to the Woodstock of yore when the rising generation had shown it could gather in great numbers, have fun and, with a few exceptions, behave responsibly.

Chapter 78: Sheriff Strikes Out

2009-01-11T06:56:00.004-05:00

The Sheriff’s posse arrived at SCRWU in a squeal of tires and a cloud of dust in the late afternoon. The media horde swarmed in right behind.

More than three-quarters of the Maggots already had been distributed to local streams; the rest lay neatly arranged on the beach ready to be taken to their final destinations. The grateful Geese had flown off to a quiet inlet for a much needed nap.

The Sheriff strode to the front with Lisa Norstrom, Big Al and J.P. Winslow in tow. Norman remained in the car, mumbling, “A million Maggots.” That’s mostly what he had said all morning, except for an occasional “Kill Captain Don.” As for his bouts of bubbling, Lisa had tied a cloth around his neck so he wouldn’t stain his shirt. The only thing she could find was an oversized burp bib last worn by Norman’s son as an infant. It was embroidered in florid script with the words, “I Coo And Pooh, That’s All I Do.”

Lisa’s hurried phone call to J.P. had led to this confrontation. He had been growing disquieted about the whole campaign, especially after his confrontation with Cleodis on TV and the crisis management meeting that had produced only talk about The Babe and her doings. Then the Summit failure out at SCRWU had shown him the Swallows were tougher to intimidate than he had imagined.

“Save Our Boats had clearly lost the initiative,” J.P. told Lisa on the phone.

“What can we do about it?” she asked.

“Well, it may be time to spend some of those big bucks we’ve been gathering the past year,” he said.

“All the money requires Norman’s signature and he’s not exactly in any shape to give it right now,” she said, looking over at Norman still mumbling in his chair. Big Al sat nearby, fascinated with the bubbles streaming out of the other man’s mouth.

“The choice is up to you,” J.P. said. “I have my legal Eagles standing by. We can charter a jet and be up there by mid-afternoon. I think your Big Al is right. You don’t want a bunch of Black Fly Maggots floating all around. Have you ever been bitten by one?” he said.

Actually, Lisa never had, a fact that probably made her exaggerate the pain. Yes, Black Fly bites could hurt, but not as much as Lisa now imagined. She mistakenly ranked them up there with kidney stones or limb amputations.

“Okay, come on up,” she told J.P.

After hanging up the phone, Lisa explained to Big Al everything that had happened the past few weeks. He filled her in about the canoe trip to the Lord’s lair. Lisa appreciated Big Al’s encouragement. She knew it wasn’t fashionable nowadays, because of women’s lib and all that, but with Norman out of commission, it sure was comforting to have another man around the house.

After first seeking Big Al’s counsel on the matter, Lisa reluctantly opened up Norman’s checkbook and gingerly “helped” him write his name on the signature line.

“Heaven help us,” she exclaimed when done. “God Bless America… and Canada too,” she added for Big Al’s sake, hoping Canada was a Christian country.

The Sheriff had required a lot of convincing before agreeing to dispatch his deputies. Had it not been Lisa doing the talking he might never have made the journey out to the Swallow facility. The Sheriff had long ago decided that — like the town’s solitary strip club, certain streets on the other side of the railroad tracks and the Mayor’s house — the Swallow facility was an establishment best not visited.

The deputies ran hither and yon, from one end of the bisflats wall to the other, yelling commands into their walkie talkies. They were caught in the classic bind of all conventional forces fighting a guerrilla war. They were alienating the very same community they hoped to protect. It was almost comic in a Keystone Kops kind of way. Had the memory of that other raid on the Swallows home not been so prominent in their minds, some of the Birds might have even laughed.

The Sheriff strode up to Captain Don and said, “You’re under arrest for transporting contraband terrorist materials into the United States of America.”

The assembled reporters diligently videotaped the proceedings. Fox News was beaming the event live around the world, the inevitable result of a 24/7 news operation.

“Wait one minute, Sheriff,” the Captain replied. “You’d better talk to my lawyers. They’ll explain what’s going on.”

TV reporters, like their Jazz Age print brethren of yore, told their audience to hold on, cameras flashed as the Captain stepped aside. Behind him stood his team, hair neatly combed and slicked back, suits pressed, shoes shined, embossed leather briefcases in hand, folded subpoenas in breast pockets. The Sheriff responded by stepping aside, as well. There were his and J.P.’s teams of attorneys.

This Bird World War quickly deteriorated into a Word War.

For the next hour — most print reporters stopped writing after 10 minutes when it became apparent they were witnessing a standoff, Fox News cameras churned away the whole time — for the next hour, the two opposing forces faced each other in a pas de deux instantly recognizable to any baseball manager or umpire. An imagined line in the sand kept them apart save for an occasional index finger jab in the chest that was always parried by a glare into the other’s eyes.

The critical issues remained constant for the duration: Were Maggots weapons of mass destruction? Were they even contraband? Were they an agricultural product or wildlife? Could a Goose be arrested for smuggling? Besides, weren’t they Canadian Geese, resident in the U.S.? Why hadn’t Custom inspectors ever stopped them before?

Clearly, existing laws were not up to snuff in these extraordinary times. The Sheriff was only a sheriff, not a legislator or even a chief executive. He couldn’t be both a policeman and a lawmaker at the same time. This whole Swallow affair was beginning to make him sick.

While Norman bubbled and mumbled, the lawyers hemmed and hawed and the reporters, J.P., Big Al, Lisa, and the Captain shuffled their feet and examined their finger nails — all the while the Birds kept loading. One of the more enterprising photographers left the pack to shoot back at the gathering over a Bird being loaded with Maggots, sort of like that famous picture on Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day when news people mobbed him in his farewell moments at Yankee Stadium and one photographer captured it all by standing off to the side. The major difference was that in this picture it was a bunch of Birds, not an aging ball player, who considered themselves the “luckiest beings on the face of this earth.”

After an hour of heated exchanges, the Word War was rendered moot anyways. All the Maggots had been dispatched to their happy breeding grounds. There was nothing anyone could do but threaten further litigation.

“I’m sorry, I can’t fight today’s battle with a plan developed for the last war,” the Sheriff told Lisa, hoping she wouldn’t lose faith in his manhood. “This is an international dispute. You can’t expect us to be the world’s policeman.”

He left without arresting anyone. The reporters and lawyers shuffled home or off to a bar.

Lisa didn’t know what to do next. Even J.P. seemed to be at his wit’s end.

Big Al, alone, urged Lisa to continue the good fight. He tried to buck up her and J.P. with some tough talk.

They were gathered in Lisa’s car, just outside the gates at SCRWU with Norman in his burp bib in the back seat next to Big Al. Lisa and J.P. were in the front.

Big Al put his arm around Norman shoulders and said, “Look, the big guy here expects us to carry on the fight. You’ve tried to negotiate with the Birds; maybe it’s time we tried another approach: the good ol’ scorched earth way, ehhh?”

Chapter 79: The Institute Finds a Home

2009-01-11T06:52:00.005-05:00

Captain Don finally had some free time to talk with The Babe. Little did anyone know these brief moments would be both their first and last ones together, as precious as Bernie Mac’s and Isaac Hayes’ fleeting meeting in the movie Soul Men or Abraham Zapruder’s all-too-brief parting glimpses of JFK.

Norman had always liked the Babe’s quiet ways even though they had been adversaries before he had gone to Canada. He wanted to know more about Norman and his misguided efforts to attack the Swallows.

The Babe was willing to talk about her former mate even though it was obviously still a touchy subject.

“I shared Norman’s ‘boat owners first’ point of view,” she said. “It’s so easy to ignore the other side and judge it by applying your own standards. We should have realized the Swallows were doing nothing wrong, according to their way of life.”

“Norman began to believe his own lies,” she said. “So did I, in the beginning. Then I tried to figure out the Swallows from their point of view and realized it was better to work with them rather than fight against them. Norman wasn’t flexible enough to make that transition,” The Babe said with a trace of sadness in her voice.

“As people turned against him, Norman only hardened his stance against the Swallows, hoping for some dimly perceived ‘victory.’ Towards the end, I’d ask him what he hoped to accomplish and wasn’t he worried about the consequences of his actions.

"Most Flies understand this better than he did. If someone is about ready to swat them, they get out of the way. When the whole world was ready to swat Norman, he just stood there and took it."

“The last thing I told him was, ‘You can’t “save” your boat at the expense of losing your ideals. Then, you’d only have an empty hull of a life’.”

The Captain was impressed with the Babe’s choice of words and logic. He had also heard that during his absence she had spent much time getting to know the Swallows.

The Babe filled him in on all the details about her institute, including her efforts to Cross Species Pair Bond with Hala. “You and Lut were the first to bond,” she told the Captain.

“I guess you’re right;” he said. “It’s funny. I guess I’m not analytical like you. I never thought about it much. It just seemed like the right thing to do.”

“You’re just a natural,” The Babe said. “You’ve got to come teach at the Institute whenever we figure out where to locate it.”

The Captain didn’t have to think about that statement for more than a moment, “Let’s put the Institute right here,” he said, gesturing to the 50 acres of woods that were located behind the bisflats. “That way, the Swallows would never have to traverse hostile human territory on their way to all the activities.”

The Babe was overwhelmed with emotion. She started to cry. “You’ve made my day.”

The Swallows were equally overjoyed when they heard about the plans to locate her institute right on the property.

Nafi quickly figured out the one Fly in the ointment about the plan. “That means we Swallows can only be here for the summer semesters.”

Lut laughed, “If you want to spend another winter up here, go right ahead.”

Nafi actually had to think about that proposition, for a moment. The Babe had told him so many wondrous things about her institute that he actually considered spending winters up north.

Then reality kicked in: the snow, the freezing temperatures, no Hala or Lut.

“Naw, that’s not for me,” he said.

Nafi’s momentary dilemma set The Babe thinking. This Cross Species Pair Bonding had alerted her to all the insights to be gained from thinking like another animal. It was said in the years ahead that CSPB was the primary force behind most innovations, a tipping point as important as the computer and internet revolutions of yore.

Those cold month semesters at her institute would be a problem for a lot of animals. She ought to think about a Southern branch; she wouldn’t mind the warm weather either.

She had heard the term “snow Bird” before. Maybe it was time to try it out for herself.

Chapter 70: Fly-Human Standoff

2009-01-04T06:25:00.014-05:00

“Yowwwwwweeeeeeeee!” Captain Don’s yell resonated through the underground cavern.

It was a tossup as to who was the most frightened, the humans or the Flies. Both were mortified seeing the other in their presence. The Flies had been meeting there in solitude for a long time; the humans never knew Flies met in the first place.

A stunned standoff ensued; both sides resisted their initial impulses. The Flies wanted to attack, to bite, to suck, but it was a little too early in the season. They were still living off their “baby fat” from their Maggot stage; there was also all that beefsteak fungus and muscaria ready to be consumed. Human blood, while certainly tasty, was second best, something to fall back upon when the really good stuff ran out.

Captain Don’s and Big Al’s initial reaction was to swat away when they saw the Black Flies, but it was too early in the season, not yet Mother’s Day. Something primordial, some “hallmark” in the men’s minds, told them swatting would not be an efficacious response.

Or perhaps, the Fly-human standoff was just a case of the working of the principle of “Mutual Assured Destruction.” Both sides in that cellar were worried if they struck first it could precipitate a series of mutual retaliations resulting in the destruction of both. Ironically, the conflict that had inspired this principle, the Cold War, was over, with the sole remaining Super Power now able to do whatever it wanted, wherever it wanted, except in certain cases.

Whatever the reason, the Flies and the humans stared at each other a very long time. Their mutual revulsion was palpable. The Flies’ disgust was directed at the goony human heads with their tiny, single lens, beady eyes, flared nostrils with hair sticking out and pink spongy mouth parts, still wide open in shock and awe due to the circumstances of the opening salvoes of their encounter.

The humans were revolted by the Flies’ seemingly insentient glassy eyes that reflected back hundreds of images of reduced beings … humans … themselves, and by the sight of their repellant, rapier-like hairy mandibles that could penetrate rawhide to bring down steers with a thousand lashes.

The Lord of the Black Flies was part human, part Fly. He, alone, among his millions of minions could live for more than one season. The Lord, most of him, at least, was Dr. Jarda Jirasek, a Czech scientist who, while high on his own drug, pervitin, had bungled a radiation experiment. The circumstances of that blunder were remarkably similar to that seminal 1950s horror movie whose resulting childhood nightmares had led to long sessions of psychotherapy for so many of us. A Fly was trapped in the chamber during the experiment and the result was standing in front of Captain Don this very moment: a Fly head, with some human brain parts, on top of a human body with some Fly parts, most notably thin hairy legs instead of arms.

How the Fly-scientist managed to get out of his native land, through Canadian customs, up to Algonquin Park and convince the native Flies of his supremacy would make for a fascinating book. It has yet to be written, but the details of his early life can be found in the “The Golden Rule,” soon to be put into print perhaps by some percipient publisher reading these very words.

The Lord of the Black Flies was a stay-at-home type of guy. He, alone of all the Flies, would never be found dead, literally dead, around any humans. He lived off the fungi in the larder all year round while the worker Flies went out into the world to carry out their biting bacchanalia. Only a few would return to headquarters to lay their eggs and die. The rest would broadcast their ova from the air into streams and lakes with moving water. Then, as their final act of the season, their Swan song, if you will, they would dive, like an aging Pavlova, into the forest duff to die.

The moving water was crucial to the species survival. Adult females would lay 150-500 eggs that would attach themselves to aquatic weeds. Then, in the spring, the flowing water would bring nutrients to the larva that had hatched from the eggs. As carefully as a doting Balletmaster, The Lord would nurture the few eggs in his care so they could attend to him next spring.

Big changes in the Black Fly world were in the works. Using enriched uranium supplied by friends in Pakistan, the Lord was working on a brand new species, the “Flosquito.” This life form would have the biting power of a Fly but the longevity of a Mosquito. No more of this one-month-and-you’re-out kind of life. The goal was for, at the least, a summer-long blood sipper. Who knew what was the limit once that was accomplished? A year-round bug could mean a major advance, perhaps once and for all time, resolving the Flies’ nurture-nature predicament. Longer living creatures could accumulate greater knowledge of their prey and not have to re-learn it or rely on genetic memory each generation. A “Super Bug” was in sight.

The very frightened Captain Don and the very big Big Al were very unaware of any of this. All they knew was they were up against the Lord of the Black Flies and his many followers. Who would come out on top was unknown right up to the very end, when Captain Don, using his characteristic “cop-on-the-beat, get-to-the-point” approach, said, “We’ve come to seek your support.”

“Let’s talk,” his highness replied in English, hissing his “Ts” in his thick Czech accent.

Chapter 71: A Long History of Swatting

2009-01-04T06:24:00.016-05:00

When he got to know The Babe, during their brief post-Canada sojourn, Captain Don realized how useful she would have been up north in Algonquin.

“Your principles of human-animal coexistence could have helped both the Lord and me realize our mutual self interests much earlier in the negotiations,” he told her later.

The Babe was to write at length about the history of humans and Flies biting and swatting in her weighty tome, Splat!. Her oft-quoted maxim, “Mind whom you swat because you may be swatted next,” came from this extraordinary work of art, an Oprah’s Book Club® selection. During the writing of her treatise several years hence, The Babe would find herself absent-mindedly swatting at one of the many Black Flies that plagued the upstate region. They had been imported into the region by the recently deceased Captain Don. She had to struggle mightily to seize control of her sub-cortex away from her autonomic reflexes.

“Otherwise, I might have injured that innocent creature!” The Babe would relate. “And who knows what the consequences of that selfish act would have been? We humans tend to concentrate only on the negative results of human-Insect interaction — like the Grasshoppers in Egypt or the Mosquitoes in the Panama Canal or the Fleas with their Black Plague in medieval Europe. But we forget about the Bees pollinating our crops, Earth Worms enriching our soil or the Butterflies brightening our days. Remove any of these from the living equation only at your own peril! The world can’t tolerate everybody swatting everybody and everything else.”

Splat! begins in the past, “The swatting relationship between humans and Flies probably dates back to homo erectus — the paleontological term for early man, not a description of your average gay guy — who stepped out onto the savannah and thus freed up his hands from holding on to branches in the trees,” she wrote.

“In the 20th century, humans upped the ante,” The Babe continued, “replacing mechanical swatting power with dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and the like.

“The Flies swung back with a little ‘hoisted-by-your-own-petard’ adaptation of DDT persistence in the environment. That was discovered at the last minute by Rachel Carson. Now, Bacillus thuringiensis subspecies. Israelensis (Bti) is the current rage. Unlike DDT, it is a naturally occurring insecticide so perhaps would not accumulate in the food chain,” The Babe wrote.

“But, take it from the Lord of the Black Flies himself,” The Babe concluded, “don’t hold your breath on that claim.”

The Babe paid tribute to the theories of Dr. Cleodis T. Cunningham. She appreciated the way he had connected the Birds’ and Blacks’ struggles. She wrote in her book’s preface about how she had gone out of her way to meet him soon after his National Press Club speech.

Their relationship got off to a rocky start. Cunningham thought The Babe was still aligned with Norman and that honky, J.P. Winslow, whom he had debated to a pulp that Sunday morning. Accordingly, Cleodis tried to shame her with a round of “Yo Mamas.”

No sooner did they shake hands than he said, “Yo Norman’s so stupid, he thinks the chicken and egg came at the same time.”

The Babe feigned anger, “Yo mama raised you so poor, you don’t know the difference between a free lady and a wife,” she shot back.

A twinge of uncertainty flitted across Cleodis’ face, but he soldiered on, “Yo Norman’s so belligerent, he thinks he can browbeat Birds … except they ain’t got no foreheads!”

The Babe applied the coup de grâce, “Yo mama raised you so poor, you don’t know how to read a newspaper: Norman and I have split up.”

“Yo… Mama Mia, Babe, I didn’t know you were a free lady!” Cleodis said with a new-found respect.

The Babe roared with laughter, “Quit ‘woofin’ me, Cleodis — can I call you by your first name? — I really admire your work,” she said with a big smile.

It was all sugar and spice and everything treacly nice after that. There was no more “woofin” or “dissing” each other, no more “Yo Mamas” or trying to outdo each other. Their unusual initial meeting led them to become steadfast friends. Later, after Captain Don’s demise, Cleodis became her unofficial spiritual advisor. One wag would compare this unusual pairing to the on-again, off-again relationship between President Barack Obama and the nation’s Poet Laureate, The Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Back in Canada, the Lord had lots of concerns other than insecticides. Yes, he could provide many Maggots bred specifically for biting humans, not Avians, but how did he know this wasn’t just a ploy to trick him into exposing the whereabouts of his best anti-human troops?

“We don’t operate that way. You have to trust us humans,” Captain Don said.

Big Al was shocked. He mumbled under his breath, “You’re crazy! We humans love to kill Flies. Next to hockey, it’s our national pastime. What’s going on here?” Big Al whispered in the Captain’s ear.

During a break in the negotiations, the Captain tried to explain to his guide what had happened down south. Big Al was not easily persuaded. Had he been an American upstater, he would have most assuredly been a Norman Squires booster. At least, that’s how he reacted when told about the Swallows.

“Them little buggers do shit a lot,” Big Al said. “I’ve had a few canoes ruined by their hockey puck doo-doo, ehhh?”

“That’s not the point,” the Captain said, refusing to assuage Big Al’s fears and prejudices. Eventually, he seemed to bring Big Al around to his way of thinking.

“Well, at least, I’ve shut him up for the time being,” Captain Don thought to himself. “Besides, the whole point of this exercise is to enlist the support of the Lord of the Black Flies, not persuade a wilderness guide to join our cause.

“The most important things first,” Captain Don reminded himself. “With thousands, no, millions of Black Fly Maggots imported into the upstate area, Norman would have no chance in hell of persuading people to knock off the best darn Black Fly catchers in the world: Swallows. They would become as indispensable to human health as the Flies would be to Swallow’s nutrition.

“Mmm boy, put Black Fly back on the bill of fare,” Captain Don thought to himself, smacking his pink spongy mouth parts together in mock glee.

Chapter 72: Summit Meeting

2009-01-04T06:22:00.014-05:00

J.P. Winslow insisted on a summit meeting with the Swallows out at SCRWU.

Norman wanted to know why, “I thought those Birds are evil buddies of the Nazis? That’s what you told us in the beginning.”

“Never believe your own propaganda,” J.P. cautioned him with a wink and wry smile. “You always have to be flexible so you can negotiate directly with your adversaries. Besides, having the Captain away and Babe there is a wonderful opportunity to settle this whole mess. You do want to resolve it, don’t you?”

“Do we?” Norman asked Lisa.

“Of course, we do, dear” she said, patting Norman on the head.

The Babe had placed two conditions on her helping to arrange a meeting between J.P., Norman and the Swallows: “No VNR news crews and no Lisa,” she said.

The Babe still hadn’t come to grips with the notion that the media would be so willing to accept canned news footage, especially video coming from one side in the story. As for Lisa, well, that was still a sore subject. Just as Norman hadn’t adapted to her leaving, she hadn’t dealt with his absence. She didn’t know it, but Norman was as jealous of her Birds as she was of his new bird, Lisa.

On the ride out to the facility, she told J.P. about her reactions to his debate with Cleodis T. Cunningham on the Sunday morning talk shows.

“You saw those?” J.P. said. He could literally count on one hand the number of people who had told him they had viewed even one. Apparently, the combination of Sunday morning, the month of August with all its vacations and the topic under discussion had been a deadly combination.

“Of course I did,” The Babe said. “Didn’t everybody?”

Norman hemmed and hawed a bit before saying, “I had to work on my boat that day.”

“All morning?” The Babe teased her ex-husband. “Those Birds must have been really active that day. Well, J.P., I too had things to do, but still watched you all five times. I even taped one of the two that played at the same time so I could see them both,” she said.

J.P. said, “I was feeling odd that morning. I had some dizzy spells for some reason.”

“You know, I was going to say you didn’t look so good,” The Babe said. “Pale, sallow faced, sort of like Nixon in his great debates,” she said.

Everyone interested in politics knew about the Nixon-Kennedy Debates in 1960. Nixon had just come out of the hospital and refused to wear any makeup. As a result, he looked gaunt and unshaven. Most people who saw the debate on TV gave the dapper Kennedy the victory while those who only heard it on radio gave the nod to Nixon, proving the importance of the visual. From then on, no candidate for any political office ever appeared on TV without first letting a professional makeup artist perform his magic. It marked the shotgun marriage of politics and show business.

J.P. winced at the thought he had looked as bad as Nixon. He had used makeup four time that morning.

“I bet it was my goddamned doppelgänger they missed that fifth time when my corporeal body stayed in the limo!” he said to himself.

“There was one other thing,” The Babe said, “You and Cleodis both seemed to be repeating yourselves. Did you guys rehearse it that way?”

“That was unscripted TV,” J.P. said.

“Yeah, sure, just like ‘Survivor’ and ‘Embedded Young Jornos’, I bet,” The Babe said with a sarcastic laugh.

J.P. withdrew into himself, a rare occurrence for him. Babe took that as a partial victory in their never-ending battle.

The Babe escorted the two men through the gates at SCRWU. The tight security impressed J.P. Working in post-9/11 Washington D.C. and being a frequent flyer, he had grown accustomed to all the metal detectors and inane questions about people asking you to carry suspicious packages and such. Like many others of the frequent-flyer ilk, the more he could avoid the long lines the more he supported enhanced security. Nowadays, thanks to his premium status on the airlines, J.P whisked right past Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public at airport checkpoints.

Norman, however, who lived in the relatively underpopulated upstate region and prided himself on having never joined a frequent flyer club, deemed security to be ridiculous.

“If they want to catch terrorists, just start stopping all the Birds over four months old and Moslem males under the age of 45,” he’d tell anyone who’d hear him out, including a few Transportation Security Agency Guards at his regional airport who didn’t have any choice but to listen. The area’s long-time congressman had earmarked a good chunk of the federal terrorist money for his constituents’ local airport. As a result, outbound upstaters could expect a virtual valet search service with one agent per flyer on some early morning flights. In their several years of pat downs and arms up, these guards had never discovered anything more incriminating than an occasional nail file or a spray can of deodorant. Self preservationists that they were, the agents attributed the lack of terrorist items to their Eagle-eyed presence.

“They should use some of that security money here to check out each Bird’s defecation habits,” Norman grumbled as they approached the bisflats wall. He swore he could smell the “damn manure makers” the moment their car drove through the gates. Many of the Swallows, including Lut, Hala and Nafi were lined up to greet their visitors. Only Lut had ever seen Norman, the man who had tormented them for the past year. J.P. as well as his PR profession were complete unknowns to all the Birds.

J.P. sprang out of the car and walked briskly towards the Birds, with his hand outstretched. “J.P.’s the name and PR’s the game,” he said.

A few of the more skittish Birds fluttered away, frightened by his aggressive patter and threatening gesture. Realizing they were afraid of him, J.P. stared at his own outstretched hand and, after a little self-conscious laugh, used it to smooth his hair.

Lut’s group held its ground; they were more accustomed, than the rest, to being around humans, especially obnoxious ones like their guards at the detention facility and J.P.

The Babe hurried to catch up, fearing J.P.’s attempt at familiarity would breed contempt and lead to a breakdown in the discussions before Babe’s plan could work.

“I see Birds of a feather flock together,” J.P. jauntily proclaimed upon reaching the wall, hoping to overcome the Birds’ reticence with some down-home humor.

The assembled Birds greeted his jocularity with stony silence. Yes, they got the joke; they just didn’t think it was funny.

The Babe caught up, a little out of breath, “These are the three famous inhabitants of Nest Number One,” she said, trying to recapture control of the situation. “And this is J.P. Winslow, head of public relations for Save Our Boats. And, coming up behind us, is my former husband, Norman V. Squires.”

All the Birds shifted their gaze to the balding man laboring in the rear. It seemed incredible such an inconsequential being could have caused so much trouble for them.

Hala wondered what The Babe could have seen in the man for so long, Nafi glared at him in a decidedly unfriendly manner. Lut just stared straight ahead; he had seen him before. Besides, he was still memorizing his lines.

J.P. moved close to the wall and peered at the Birds. He was a little too close for comfort, but the Birds couldn’t back off without falling off.

“Remarkable creatures,” J.P. said to The Babe, peering at the Birds. “Look at those V-shaped tails and iridescent blue color of their feathers and that chestnut colored band under their necks,” he said, having read up on Swallows in Wikipedia.

The third time was definitely the charm here, even for the normally skeptical Nafi. The Birds were putty in the hands of this PR Pro.

The Babe winked at Hala as if to tell her to watch out for the “Snake charmer.”

Norman immediately ruined J.P’s whole goodwill effort. When he caught up to the group, he jabbed his finger at Lut and said in a definitely non-PR-Pro kind of way, “I’ve seen you before, Bub.”

Despite his brusqueness, you had to give Norman credit. Unlike most humans, he had no trouble distinguishing one Swallow from the rest. Usually, only people who had a pet of that species were able to recognize one individual animal from the others. And Norman, unless you counted that Woodchuck who hung around outside his cottage or Muskrat who lived under the Boathouse, never took care of any animal, Dog or Cat or any kind of Bird, for that matter, his entire life.

Norman’s remark propelled Lut back to that spring morning last year when he had ventured into the Boathouse and all their troubles had begun. He entertained a thought about dropping another load right here on the spot, but that would make Lut a “double dipper,” a distinction only Hala should achieve in his family.

The Babe tried to reduce the tension by saying, “We’re not here to discuss old business, but to deal with some new issues.”

“Yes, let’s cut to the chase,” J.P. said, using an old term that had originated in the print world where a “chase” was the metal frame holding the type. Then, the term had been adopted by movie directors who wanted to get directly to the action shots. J.P. was thinking of the movie metaphor.

Ever the flamboyant director, J.P. squinted through a frame formed by his outstretched index finger and thumb, sizing up the surroundings. Then he assumed the role of the thespian.

“This is a lovely place,” he said. “Lots of lovely water and trees. The air is so pure,” he made a grand gesture of taking in a lungful of oxygen and savoring it in his chest.

“We like it,” Nafi said cautiously, being a little put off by J.P.’s theatrics which seemed strained even to a Bird not very familiar with human ways. The Babe had told them to expect such showmanship.

J.P fixed as many Birds’ gazes as he could and continued with his contrived performance, “Wouldn’t it be a shame if the authorities were convinced to, say …” he paused for effect, “…to say, put in a garbage dump next door. Now, I’m sure if we worked together, we could avert that possibility.”

Drool dribbled from the corners of J.P.’s mouth.

The Swallows studied his secretion — saliva was a fascinating substance for Birds who lathered their nests with it — then they looked at each other and finally glanced at The Babe to see if it was time to proceed.

Yes, it was, she nodded.

So, in singsong unison, the Birds said, “The garbage dump would be great. Garbage attracts lots of flies, doesn’t it? We could use the extra food.”

The Babe and the Birds looked pleased; J.P. looked appalled. He did a classic double take.

“Pardon me, what did you just say?” J.P enquired.

As planned, this time Lut spoke for the rest, “We said we’d welcome a garbage dump or anything else that would attract lots of insects. We’re Birds. That’s what we eat,” he said with an unusual staccato cadence in his voice, as if her were reciting from a script.

The Babe hoped J.P. and Norman were as unfamiliar with Bird pretense as the Birds were with theirs.

“Thank God, the twain shall never meet,” she thought.

She was a fan of Rudyard Kipling’s prose, but not his politics. Yesterday, having been told in confidence by the PR Pro, himself, that he would try to intimidate the Birds with a phony garbage dump plan, she had tutored the Birds how to parry J.P.’s threat with their own bluff. They had done marvelously.

The Babe’s indiscretion in disclosing J.P.'s secret to the Birds convinced him never to trust his own species ever again. Some claim this act contributed directly to J.P.'s dementia; others say Alzheimer's disease was the cause. Whatever the reason, it was all downhill for J.P. from here.

But The Babe was on a roll. “That little white lie of the Birds’ liking garbage would add immeasurably to the two white men’s burden,” The Babe would write later in describing the incident.

“And thank God, J.P. hadn’t thought about threatening the only thing the Birds could not have abided or lied about: moving a subdivision of people in next door,” she wrote.

At their planning session yesterday, Nafi had made it clear: the mention of thousands of people, their cars, and Dogs and screaming kids coming to this neighborhood would have driven him shrieking straight for J.P.’s face.

The Babe was learning fast. She remembered when J.P. had first showed up on the scene and had startled her by saying, “These Swallows are barbarians, they’re disgusting, they’re…animals.”

She could pat herself on the back after today. Thanks to her plan, Mr. J.P. Know-it-all Winslow, contrary to what he had told Norman earlier, was caught up in his own propaganda; he was reacting to these Swallows as if they were Animals rather than the sentient beings The Babe’s Cross Species Pair Bonding had taught her they were.

Of course, the Swallows didn’t want a garbage dump next door, but they’d never give J.P. the satisfaction of knowing it.

Chapter 73: Negotiations Move Ahead

2009-01-04T06:21:00.002-05:00

Captain Don’s negotiations were going as poorly as J.P.’s. Both the Lord of the Black Flies and Big Al seemed a little put off by the meeting.

Captain Don didn’t know it, but he was encroaching into the Lord’s feeding time. Like a Queen Bee, the Lord was smarter, heavier and, yes, hungrier than the workers. He also liked to get high. Hence the amanita muscaria, or magic mushrooms, growing in the larder. Even though the Lord was hungry, he was much too polite to mention it, having been raised in Europe, “Old Europe” to boot.

Big Al wasn’t especially fond of people from the “old country.” Moreover, he didn’t much like drug takers. Most of all, he hated anything that bit him. All together, he was having a rotten time in the Lord’s lair.

“My skin was beginning to crawl with so many Flies in such close proximity,” he was to say several years later while conducting tours at the Lord of the Black Flies Mansion exhibit.

“Since the Flies were all going to be novices in this upcoming biting season, they were taking advantage of having two humans on hand to examine all the never-seen-before tasty parts,” he explained.

“They would flit on and off me as all Flies like to do. They test landed on my arms, unshaven neck, any exposed part, noting the impact of hair follicles to smooth takeoffs and landings and such. They were looking for any bit of info that would give them a tactical advantage when the season opened.”

Big Al looked disgusted. “I’d hate to think I was, in any way, contributing to their eventual success in life.”

The Lord was quite willing to send Maggots down south. “I want revenge. We’ve been pushed out of too many Northeastern states by aggressive, dirty-trickster departments of health,” the Lord said.

The Captain would transport the larvae and distribute them throughout the area. He explained some of them would be consumed by Swallows and other Birds, but he thought most of the Flies would thrive upon unsuspecting humans, many of whom had grown unaccustomed to dealing with Black Flies.

In the end, the Lord allowed his hunger for lunch to affect his decision making. In other words, the Fly half of his mind that demanded to eat now overcame his human half telling him to hold out for a better deal.

“Then, we’re agreed,” the Lord said. “We’ll deliver to you in a couple of day’s time one million Black Fly Maggots, all pre-programmed to bite only humans.”

As Captain Don and the Lord shook hands to seal the deal, smooth human hand entwined in hairy Fly leg, Big Al looked on in disgust.

“Did the Captain and his friend want to stay for lunch?” the ever-polite Lord said.

“No, thank you,” Captain Don answered after Big Al gave him a sharp elbow in the ribs.

Truth be told, the Captain would have liked to stay and dine with the Lord. He wanted to know more about how the head Fly organized his diaspora. Moreover, the Captain had grown to like the odor of carrion in the cellar that had originally shocked his system. It now whetted his appetite.

“That Captain Don!” The Babe would eulogize at his funeral. “He was the second best Tran species-ist ever, ranking right after the half-human, half-Fly Lord himself.”

Chapter 74: Falling Afoul of Something

2009-01-04T06:20:00.003-05:00

Norman first got wind something was afoul when he received a telephone call from a stranger with a funny accent.

The stranger said, “You’d better get ready for a whole lot of trouble. The Captain is importing a whole bunch of Black Fly Maggots into your area. You’d better stop him before it’s too late, ehhh?”

Norman didn’t know what to think. Ever since he started this crusade….errr campaign, he was receiving tons of crank calls. Most of them he could easily ignore because they were idle threats, like, “Quit killing them little Birdies” or “What kind of monster are you?” or “Your mother was a Finch.” That last one probably came from some fan of Darwinian evolution, he reckoned, having just watched a Fox TV program on the subject a week before.

This new phone call was different. First of all, the person had said “ehhh?” at the end. No other prank phone caller had come up with something that weird.

Second of all, Norman had just returned from the SCRWU Summit and now knew the true nature of the enemy. They were Animals in every sense of the word. If they would welcome a garbage dump just to get Flies, then who knew what else they would be willing to do?

Third of all, Lisa had experience in world languages; she had been president of the Esperanto Club in high school. She had identified the accent of the man on the phone as “Capistranian,” having just read about the Swallows returning every year to the Mission at San Juan Capistrano. Only later would she learn of her error: the Birds at the Mission were “Cliff,” not “Barn” Swallows.

Finally, Norman had learned all about his ex, Babe, working out at the new Swallows facility. Could she be a part of this whole plan? This worried Norman the most. Only during Babe’s absence did he realize how much he had relied on her. He had a new-found respect for her efforts on the Internet. Even though he was confident Lisa would soon learn to Google and assume Babe’s function there, he still missed his ex’s expert hand on the keyboard.

God only knew how much he needed an Internet intermediary. Norman had long ago given up on himself ever mastering computers and the web. He could remember back in the early 1980s when the first computers had appeared in new automobiles. Up until then he had considered himself a competent auto mechanic. He had gotten his start in his father’s dealership back shop by gapping spark plugs, replacing points and condensers, cleaning carburetors and replacing distributor caps.

Suddenly with the advent of computers, those days were gone. Now a computer monitored everything in a car. He had read somewhere the computers in 1990s cars were a thousand times more powerful than the ones on the “spaceships that had gone to the moon.”

“Well, no wonder Challenger and Apollo had trouble,” he said, “they should have installed better computers,” he told Babe when she read the item to him.

Norman always thought if computers had remained analog, like an abacus, he could have mastered them. “Continuous information just makes more sense. When everything operated on the notion of a range of differences, like One through Five, with One being “Light” and Five being “Dark,” and everything in between being shades of gray, that made sense. Then some bright guy got the idea of going digital. I thought digits had something to do with our five fingers, but they don’t. In this screwed-up digital system brought in by computers, there’s only two numbers: ‘Zero’ and ‘One.’ What’s that supposed to mean? Does ‘Zero’ equal ‘Light?’ ‘One’ equals ‘Dark?’ Where’s all the grays? That’s no improvement.

“I don’t get it,” he said raising his eyes to appeal to God in heaven.

The major reason Norman steered clear of computers was his abiding suspicion they were enslaving mankind. He remembered all the controversy about a computer commercial aired once at a Super Bowl game that showed Big Brother using computers to keep people down. The skinheads in the commercial’s audience cheered the scheme until a woman with a hammer shattered a movie screen. That act of destruction confused Norman. Why pick on movies when computers were the culprits?

Recently, he had received some new evidence of the computer’s evil intent. The computerized black boxes in cars were no longer the benign devices of yore. Yes, they could still keep track of all your engine parts, but now they were also being programmed to monitor you, the driver.

“How fast were you going? When was the last time you had your brakes checked?” Whom were you talking to on your phone? Were you listening to right wing or liberal talk radio? Nowadays, they kept track of all that kind of information.

“Some day, unless that woman with the hammer has her way again,” Norman liked to say, not being able to shake that TV ad out of his head even though it had aired only once, “everything you do behind the wheel will be recorded and used against you by Big Brother.

“So much for the freedom of the open road. Thanks a lot, Mr. Computer!” Norman said a few days before Babe’s final Internet session with him.

Norman missed Babe. He now wished he had the courage to talk about her when J.P. was here the last time.

“I can hardly bear to think about her hanging around with all those dirty, Fly-eating Birds,” he told Lisa. “Babe better watch it or she’ll come down with some terrible disease. That would teach her a good lesson, wouldn’t it?”

To hear from the mysterious caller that a million Maggots were coming to the area and knowing Babe was organizing an institute to help Birds gave Norman pause to re-evaluate his whole strategy. His concern lasted only a moment or two.

“Naaawww, Babe will never be able to convince anyone to believe in her Bird-brain idea,” he told Lisa, who immediately began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Norman demanded to know. He could never tell if people were laughing with him or at him.

“Nothing dear, it’s just you said ‘Bird-brain’ and that’s part of what The Babe’s — err, I mean Babe’s — institute will study,” Lisa said. “You made a play on words.”

Lisa would never admit it to Norman, but she was impressed by The Babe’s idea. Several years later, after Norman’s tragic imprisonment, she would remember this phrase and develop a course at the institute called “Bird-brain Ideas.” At that time, with Norman away more or less on a permanent basis, The Babe had softened her feelings about Lisa and consented to her teaching at the Institute.

Lisa’s course was a survey of seemingly “crazy” human and animal ideas that good public relations techniques had sold to their respective clientele. It began with an exhaustive look at the “Pet Rock” phenomenon that had swept the country in the 1980s. Later, in the more advanced classes, she would discuss J.P. Winslow’s work in starting the first Iraq War. The class always got a kick out of how J.P. had used the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. to lie to Congress about the Iraqi’s dumping the babies out of the incubators and that whole made up Jessica Lynch story, not to mention the way people believed Kerry was a traitor in Viet Nam.

Norman just scowled at Lisa. He was in no mood to ponder why she was laughing. He didn’t care if it was a “play on words” or “pun” or “metaphor” or “malapropism” or whatever it was. He just wanted to know who had phoned and what he had meant in saying “importing a whole bunch of Black Fly Maggots into your area.”

Then, a terrible thought struck him, “What if these Birds were thinking about moving in their own garbage dump next to humans, maybe even next to my own cottage on the lake?” he wondered.

“Not in my backyard,” he said. “Wouldn’t the world love to hear about this one?” he thought to himself.

“Lisa, when is the next Rotary meeting?” he said in a frantic tone.

“Now, now, dear, don’t get so upset,” Lisa replied, patting him on the head.

Chapter 65: All Bird’s Day

2008-12-28T06:35:00.006-05:00

Hala came up with the concept for an All Bird’s Day at SCRWU. It was a combination Open House and Field Day. She purposefully scheduled it when the Captain would be away to underscore the point this was an event “Of the Birds, By the Birds, For the Birds.”

The Babe was the only human allowed to attend. No Bird had yet learned how to write so there was no choice in the matter. She would chronicle the day’s events for posterity. Hala was very aware of the need to record everything. Like the many other critics of the new youth culture, she realized the young were spending less time on traditional activities like the Five Precepts. Hala didn’t want to simply wallow in dismal disapproval, like the other “cluckers.” Instead, she wanted to provide new exciting activities for the youth to revivify their Swallow esprit de corps.

“How about Bird races?” she first proposed. “Let’s see if Peregrine Falcons are as fast as they claim.”

Nafi couldn’t restrain himself, “Yeah, let’s see if those ‘bad boys’ can keep up with us Swallows on a slalom course.” Few of the assembled Birds had ever heard of such a thing, but they liked the idea when Nafi explained that it wasn’t a Fish, but a bunch of obstacles to fly around.

“We could also have tests of strength for different-size groups,” Hala continued.

“Put Hummingbirds up against Chickadees and Eagles against Crows,” Nafi said. “I’ll put my money on those ‘hummers’ and ‘old baldies’ any day,” he exclaimed.

After Nafi volunteered a half dozen enthusiastic responses like this, it became apparent who should be the Grand Marshall of the event. Nafi was elected by unanimous approval.

That turned out to be a wise choice. His exuberance would inspire many of the participants, especially the largest contingent, the 100 Swallows who took part. Fifty of them opened the games by zooming in low over the lake for a stirring flyover. Appreciative Geese assumed the Swallows were honoring them by flying in a wedge formation. Actually, trial and error had shown this was simply the fastest way for a bunch of them to get around.

Unfortunately, the Open House part of the day failed to inspire many Birds. Perhaps it had something to do with each species’ special way of constructing its own habitats. Many had a hard time appreciating the bisflats or the Swallows’ cup-shaped nests attached to it.

“Too tiny,” commented a Swan after laying her eyes upon the bisflats for the first time. She couldn’t imagine parking her fat rear end high up a wall. “Too prim and proper,” said a Pigeon, a species known for some of the messiest nests around. “Too damn close together,” said a Screech Owl who lived in a hollowed-out trunk of an ancient pine, far from his nearest neighbor.

Centuries of ignoring each other had taken its toll, leading many Birds to a host of false assumptions about their fellow Avians. Many couldn’t even recognize the similarity between themselves and others. After nests, the second most frequent bone of contention was where each species chose to consume its food. Waders, like the Great Blue Heron, wondered about Martins who ate on the wing while Cardinals, who consumed seeds in the woodlands, laughed at Grebes who floated around on water all day diving to the bottom to gather food.

When the competition began, disapproval of each other was replaced by a newfound respect. For the first time, Birds weren’t competing with each other for scarce resources or hiding from their predation; they were evaluating each other as fellow Avians. If they, themselves, couldn’t perform feats of derring-do, then they could marvel in the knowledge that their fellow descendants-from-the-dinosaurs, as recent discoveries had shown, could. Having wings, feathers, crops, gizzards, a beak but no teeth as well as a common ancestry could now lead to a greater solidarity than ever before.

The Peregrines led off and quickly achieved 70 miles per hour in a level race. The Swallows triumphed next, as expected, in the slalom. One by one, each species demonstrated its finesse. The Cormorants dove the deepest. The Storks clattered their bills the loudest. The Mockingbirds, in a controversial choice, were deemed the best singers even though they didn’t present original material. Eastern Bluebirds, in a decision believed by many to be a payback for the grief they had suffered from their Swallow-look-alike problems, received an honorary “Service to the Avian Community” award. The Loons were voted to have the most evocative call. Red Bellied Woodpeckers were voted most dapper plumage. And the Hummingbirds, just as Nafi had predicted, swept the field in all the hovering activities.

All Birds were winners today. Like domesticated Budgerigars who thought their human owners’ baby talk was communications, most Birds had previously fooled themselves into thinking they were having meaningful conversations with each other. Now, it was apparent how much they didn’t know about the other.

“It’s a start,” Hala said as she watched the last flock disappear into the fading sun. Calm returned to the bay in front of the bisflats. With a sigh of contentment, she retreated to Nest Number One, where, as usual, Lut and Nafi had reserved her special place between the two of them.

Chapter 66: What’s That Buzz?

2008-12-28T06:34:00.002-05:00

Captain Don and Big Al finally left the forest of wind-fallen trees behind and emerged, torn and tired, into a pleasant glen. Directly in front of them sat the old farmhouse complete with a front porch and two gabled windows on the second floor, just as Big Al had described it.

An aura of mystery permeated the structure. A loud hum emanated from it, like a vibrating giant cell phone. It was not clear where the noise was coming from. As Big Al had explained about the incident with his Dog, the house itself seemed normal, as normal as any century-old abandoned homestead could be.

Peering through the broken windows, they couldn’t see any Dr.-Zhivago-Russian-steppes–ice-palace effects, which the Captain had once read were actually frozen beeswax sculptures in temperate Spain. Here, there was very little dust or debris, not even an accumulation of wispy spider webs shrouding the floors and walls. It was almost as if someone, or something, was tidying up.

Big Al and Captain Don walked around the farmhouse, several times, but could find no living soul. Only the vibrations insisted something was amiss.

Big Al said, “It’s not too different from when I was here last, except for the noise.”

“You can sure feel that ‘hummmmmm’ in the ground,” the Captain said as he settled down on what had once been the back lawn.

“It’s as if the earth is alive,” Big Al said.

The two men lay on their backs on the vibrating ground for a few minutes. It was a pleasant effect, sort of like those “Magic Fingers” vibrating mattresses for a quarter you couldn’t find in motels anymore.

Big Al said, “Well, what are we going to do next?”

Captain Don didn’t have a clue. Nothing in the literature or on Fox had described the Lord’s lair. He’d have to rely on his own resources rather than the self-proclaimed “most trusted news source in the land.”

“Where would I like to live if I were a Black Fly?” Captain Don asked himself.

It was such a crazy concept it almost made sense in that Zen sort of way that the Captain liked so much. “Well, I’d need good cover. Bigger animals would always be trying to eat me. I’d need some protection from the spring cold. I’d ….”

Suddenly, the Captain sat bolt upright. Only one location met all his criteria; he now understood where the Lord must be. Quickly retrieving the folded-up trenching shovel from his backpack, he began to dig.

Chapter 67: Crisis Management

2008-12-28T06:32:00.005-05:00

J.P. made a hurried trip upstate. Three developments worried him: 1. The Babe’s impending divorce from Norman, 2. The Swallow’s Open House/Field Day and 3. The Captain’s visit to Canada.

“Where should we begin?” J.P. asked Norman and Lisa, the only two members of the Save Our Boats committee who could meet with him on such short notice. That, by itself, was troublesome. Perhaps J.P should add it as a fourth item to his list of problems.

“Let’s start with Babe’s departure,” he said, regretting it the moment he mentioned her because Norman’s face turned ashen and he began to whimper like a puppy deprived of its mother.

“Norman really hasn’t gotten over her leaving him,” Lisa whispered to J.P.

”Okay, let’s put Babe on the back burner for the moment,” J.P. said.

Norman looked relieved.

“Let’s talk about the Bird’s Open House and Field Day Games. Did either of you go to that?” J.P. asked.

“Well no, no one, no human was allowed to go,” Norman said defensively.

“Except for The Babe,” Lisa said, immediately wishing she hadn’t mentioned her.

Norman couldn’t restrain himself, “Babe’s everywhere nowadays. She’s going to start an institute, ‘Shit U’ or something like that,” Norman said, his face turning red because he realized he had just sworn. If he had looked dejected before, he looked crestfallen now.

“And she wants everyone to call her ‘The Babe’ now,” Lisa chimed in.

Norman scowled whenever he heard that. That name made her sound like some sort of harlot, he thought.

So far, the one topic they had agreed not to talk about, “Babe” or “The Babe,” depending upon whether you were going to comply with her stated preference — Norman certainly was not, by God — had consumed the entire meeting. J.P. knew that was not good crisis management.

“Stay in control of events, don’t let them rule you,” should be the prime directive for all PR Pros, like him.

“Okay, back to the Open House and Field Day,” J.P. said. “From everything I read, it was a success.”

“That’s because everything you read was written by The Babe,” Lisa said. “She was the only human allowed to go.”

“Please call her just ‘Babe’,” Norman whined.

“Okay,” Lisa said, “Babe and the Birds kept a tight lid on all the info coming out of there.”

“Those dirty Birds,” J.P., “Mr. Video News Release,” himself, said, “Don’t they know the free flow of info is the American way of life.”

The three hypocrites commiserated with each other for a moment.

“Well, let’s leave that for later,” J.P. said. “What about Captain Don’s trip to Canada?”

“What about it?” Norman said. “That man’s a dunderhead.”

“Yes, yes, but what’s he doing up there?” J.P. pressed on. So far this meeting was going nowhere… fast.

Lisa answered. “We don’t know anything about his whereabouts. You should ask The Babe, I mean ‘Babe.’ She’s out at that Bird sanctuary every day …Whoops!” she exclaimed, covering her mouth with her hand.

“We’re not supposed to talk about her, are we?”

Chapter 68: Into the Lair

2008-12-28T06:31:00.001-05:00

Captain Don’s determined shoveling revealed the remains of an old bulkhead basement door. Long ago, it had rotted away, then filled in with leafy debris, leaving only a slight depression in the ground where it should have let the farmer into his large canning cellar under the house. From there he could retrieve the fruits and vegetables in the quart-size Mason Jars that would sustain his family through the long Canadian winter.

A few swipes more with the shovel revealed the steps down and another door at the bottom. The buzz became a dull roar. When the other door was pried opened, the sound was deafening. But it was nothing compared to the stench of carrion that staggered the two men in their tracks.

“If you were a Fly, where else would you like to hang out?” Big Al managed to say, trying to overcome the urge to upchuck his morning’s helping of the side of bacon.

The Captain stared at the inside of the basement in disbelief, “This lord guy can afford to lead a Fly’s version of la vida loca.”

Big Al, who had spent his life mostly in the less cosmopolitan confines of the provincial park, didn’t understand the exact meaning, but got the drift.

In front of them was a fungal wonderland. Giant amanita muscarias, the appropriately named “fly mushroom,” with its white gills, white spots and bright red top, the quintessential toadstool, pushed up everywhere through the ooze that covered the floor. Like many mushrooms, it was toxic, but in a highly psychedelic way. The four corners of the cellar featured tiers of bracket fungi climbing to the ceiling. Many of them were the well-known “beefsteak fungus,” bright red, like the muscarias. They were shaped like an ox tongue, another common name for them. The difference was their flesh was sweet and nutritious, causing no side effects like the muscaria.

Captain Don recognized the bracket fungi from his days on the force. The Greenwich Village meat markets had often featured them for the vegetarian hippie crowd.

“I think we’re in the larder,” he whispered to Big Al, who, for the second time today, didn’t understand the exact word but figured it had something to do with food.

“La vida loca, indeed,” Captain Don said all too loud again after surveying the cellar a second time. “First you fill up on the beefsteak, then you party down on the muscaria.”

Big Al placed his index finger over his lips and pointed to another door off to the side, which seemed to be the source of the loud buzzing.

The two men stepped gingerly into the muck and tiptoed to the door. The ooze flooded over the tops of their boots, making their legs feel like round Pirouette cookies stuck in hot fudge sundaes.

With his hand on the door’s handle, Captain Don hesitated. Not only was it vibrating, it was, “Yech!,” warm to the touch.

Showing the same lack of caution Lut had exhibited upon his return to the Boathouse, Big Al flung open the door and almost immediately wished he hadn’t.

Staring back through the gloom at his single-lens eyes were hundreds of ghastly glowing compound ones attached to spindly hairy legs being ferociously rubbed together. And dead center in the room was the biggest, shiniest pair of compound eyes he had ever seen.

“The Lord of the Black Flies, I presume, ehhh?” Big Al said, remembering the line from a Spencer Tracy movie.

Captain Don, who was known for his loud utterances back on the lake, affirmed Big Al’s sentiment with the loudest, deepest, most ghastly whoop he had ever produced.

Chapter 69: Lut, the Leader

2008-12-28T06:30:00.015-05:00

Lut would have liked Algonquin Park, especially during its high season when the insects were at their peak. Down south, it was still the low and slow season for bugs. No one knew what to expect when summer finally arrived. Bringing together so many Swallows in one spot was an untested proposition.

“Could those other Birds have eaten all our insects during the Open House and Field Day?” Nafi wondered one afternoon when he returned to the nest having consumed far fewer bugs than his customary thousands.

Hala reprimanded Nafi on the spot, “You should shush up. That’s the old way of thinking: blaming other Birds for our problems.”

Lut would never argue against Hala, but in this instance he agreed with Nafi. He wondered out loud, “Do you think our ancestors realized the road to success lay in breaking up into small groups?”

Lut, however, wasn’t ready to give up on the whole scheme quite yet. He counseled everyone to wait for the Captain to come back.

“We’ve gotten this far with him; it’s no time to desert him now,” he’d tell anyone who’d listen. Both Hala and Nafi agreed this was the proper course of action.

The number of Swallows who were listening to Lut was increasing at a steady clip. His acclaim, which had once spanned only his small band, was now sanctuary-wide.

The emergence of leaders was just the tip of the iceberg upheaval in Swallow society. The threat posed by Norman and his humans was driving the Birds to band together in spirit as well as body. Change was on every Bird’s mind.

The Swallows were also reaching out to their Avian brethren. Hala’s Open House and Field Days had started the ball rolling. Every day, new developments continued to increase inter-species Avian awareness. For example, Swifts and Martins were coming by to compare their looks and wing spans with their Swallow cousins. A gang of Sea Gulls, as we know hostile to Swallows in the past, appeared off the beach one late afternoon and gave, as a gesture of conciliation, a demonstration of how to pluck fish out of the water. Some of the more adventurous Swallows tried to copy them, but ended up nearly drowning themselves. Some passing Ducks rescued them in the nick of time. Hala finally got to see how a Swallow could take off from the water, when these Ducks towed the drenched Swallows, who had tried to emulate the Gulls, back into the air.

Humans also started showing up offshore. These weren’t your common householder variety, but mass media types, determined to track down feature stories about the suddenly salient Swallows. When the Birds had been incarcerated and were accessible to anyone who dared to withstand their shrieking, media interest had ebbed away. Now, curiosity flowed freely again with the independent Birds secluded in their own sanctuary and the public eager to know what they were doing. There was some sort of lesson here about “/You can't always get what you want /But if you try sometimes you just might find /You just might find /You get what you need, ah yes.”

Or some jagger jibber like that.

The media had last used this tactic of showing up unannounced offshore in America’s valiant invasion of Grenada when our boys in khaki had been sent into battle with maps of the island from Hertz Rent-a-Car. There were no reporters on hand to reveal this gaffe, thanks to our ever vigilant Navy that prevented the press from landing.

At SCRWU, a shoal several hundred yards offshore prevented the media from landing there as well. That’s where the media’s rented speed boats circled endlessly as they shouted questions to the puzzled onshore Swallows. It was like all those times during the Reagan administration when, without regular news conferences, the press had no choice but to yell out questions to the “prez.” Reagan would smile and cup his ear but throw up his arms and shrug his shoulders to indicate he could hear little above the din of his waiting helicopter. Nowadays, some conjecture his Alzheimer’s might have started during his presidency, forcing his handlers to insulate him. Whatever was happening, then, as now, was moot. Suffice it to say, little communication was taking place on either occasion.

Some of the younger Swallows saw this offshore fleet as presenting an opportunity for dive bombing practice. However, even Nafi realized peppering pooh on the press might be a tactical error. The young ones were warned off at the last moment and a nasty media confrontation was narrowly averted.

After 30 minutes of shouted-but-unanswered questions from the press in speed boats, a lone figure with a wild bird on her shoulder paddled out in a canoe to talk to the reporters. It was The Babe and Hala. Even though the media could have knocked on the front door of the Babe’s townhouse any day, and even though they had seen thousands of pictures of Hala, thanks to J.P.’s videographers, the pairing of these two in this lakeside setting was a sensation. It was a touch of serendipitous exotica in the upstate. It was as if the press were Captain Blighs who had sailed half way around the world to buy breadfruit plants and had made contact with a Tahitian maiden and her South Seas pal.

While little actual new information was to develop from this incursion into SCRWU waters, this propitious photo opportunity was to mark an important turning point in the War of the Swallows. Paul Gauguin couldn’t have limned a more powerful fantasy. The image of “The Babe and the Bird,” as it became known, was to sell hundreds of thousands of greeting cards, hats, coffee mugs and t-shirts and, coincidentally, cement the notion of human-Bird togetherness in the American consciousness.

The power of Cross Species Pair Bonding was on display and the public was putty in the hands of the nation’s image makers. Norman and J.P. could pontificate all they wanted about manure, boats and property rights, but they could offer nothing as powerful as this iconic presentation of interspecies love.

This photo was the perfect antidote to a country grown tired of seeing pictures of napalm-scarred screaming children running naked down a country road. It represented a return to happier times when a jubilant GI could canoodle a girl in Times Square and not be arrested for sexual harassment.

A war-weary public wanted to believe there were better ways to make a point. Months of aggressive confrontation with the Swallows had produced little of value; perhaps the Beatles were right, “All you need is love.” And this action needn’t bankrupt a nation. Cultural historians would later say, thanks to this one photo, the value of a single picture skyrocketed to a million words.

After the reporters left that day, a few Geese showed up just to hang out. They ended up giving Swallow hatchlings rides on their backs to see how it felt to fly through the air.

“Pre-fledgling flight instruction,” Lut said.

As for the Geese, it turned out they were advance scouts, sent out to practice transporting Maggots, per their agreement with Captain Don.

Nafi loved watching the little ones take flight on the backs of the Geese. As usual, ever the conversationalist, he couldn’t resist taking the notion one step further. “They look like Ferdie the Firefly and Dandy the Goose,” he said.

Lut laughed out loud, “Nafi just won’t let sleeping stories lie.”

Nafi liked that quip so much he repeated it more than once that day, laughing each time, especially when he realized his own remark contained a double doble entendre

Chapter 61: Paddling and Portaging

2008-12-21T07:58:00.015-05:00

Up in Canada, days passed as the canoeists paddled steadily northwards. The Captain’s gluteus was also beginning to ache to the maximus from all the sitting.

Big Al steered them through a steady stream of lakes; there were more than 31,000 bodies of water larger than three square kilometers. All together, 60% of all lakes in the world are located in Canada. The nearby Great Lakes, which form the border with the U.S., contain more than one-fifth of all the fresh water on the globe. All this “aitch-two-o” was a perfect breeding ground for Black Flies.

Their progress was sporadic with long sessions of easy paddling punctuated by portages of sheer drudgery as all the supplies, including the canoe, had to be manhandled overland through rugged terrain. The Captain would go first with a machete in hand, blazing a tunnel through the undergrowth high enough for the trailing Big Al who hefted the canoe above his head with the paddles, lashed to the seats, resting on his shoulders. He had permanent grooves worn into his collarbone from a lifetime of such efforts.

As each day drew to a close, the Captain felt a growing ambivalence about the trip. One day possibly closer to the Lord of the Black Flies meant one day farther from civilization. Would this adventure end in an historical meeting or a massive misadventure? Would it be two weeks in the boondocks — lots of Bloodsuckers as fat as your fist, Muskies as long as your leg — but no Lords of the Black Flies? All the while, Norman and his minions were hatching their devious plot to cleanse the upstate of Swallows.

The second night out Big Al told his favorite campfire story. It was about three petroleum company owners who battled each other to control the market. One of them gets away with murder.

Big Al begins, “The owners are named George, Rick and Ron.”

“Those names sound familiar,” Captain Don says.

“I hope you haven’t heard this story before,” Big Al says. “Rick and Ron own their stations as well as the source of their gasoline while George just owns stations, but he has lots more of them than the other two.”

Big Al continues, “George is one of your countrymen, Captain Don, but Rick and Ron are foreigners,” Big Al says with a conspiratorial wink.

“Anyways, as all their businesses grow bigger, George starts to buy more gasoline from Rick and Ron to supply his increasing number of stations,” Big Al says.

“After a while, George realizes he’s in a pickle. If he continues to expand, he will only make Rick and Ron rich, richer than he is.”

Captain Don interrupts, “I get it. The real money is in the ground, not in the stations.”

“Exactly,” Big Al says. “You can’t find more oil if you don’t own the right ground.

“So George does the only thing he can: he tries to play the other two against each other to lower the price. When that fails, he threatens first Rick, then Ron.”

Big Al lowers his voice to add suspense to the story. An owl hoots in the distance sending a shiver down the Captain’s spine.

“In the end, George kills Rick, then starts controlling his oil,” Big Al says.

“I bet that causes Ron to start paying attention,” Captain Don interjects.

“You bet your sweet loonie, it does.” Big Al says, referring to the slang name for his his country’s one-dollar coin.

“What a difference a little sovereignty makes,” Captain Don thinks to himself. “Back home, they shoot Birds. Up here, they elevate them to the pinnacle of financial metaphor.”

Big Al continues his story, “Ron is growing concerned about competing with a ruthless guy with larceny in his heart, who now has more stations to sell more petroleum.”

“So how does Ron stop George from killing him and taking his oil?” the Captain wants to know.

“Aha, Ron starts a rumor he has a secret weapon he’ll use if George comes after him,” Big Al says.

“Hold on a minute,” the Captain says, “didn’t George use secret weapons as his excuse for killing Rick? Why does Ron circulate rumors about weapons if he knows George used that same argument to kill Rick?” the Captain looks confused.

“Pretty smart, ehhh?” Big Al says. “Rick said he didn’t have weapons, George attacked anyways and looked silly when no weapons were found. So, now Ron, who actually has weapons, can start a rumor but deny it, knowing George can’t retaliate because of his mistake in attacking Rick just a little while ago.”

“I get it,” the Captain says. “George can’t act as if Ron has a weapon and kill him because that would only remind everyone he killed another guy, Rick, who turned out not to have weapons, just to get his oil and dominate the market.” It all makes sense to the Captain in that crazy Zen sort of way that he so admires.

“Something like that,” Big Al responds, disappointed because the Captain has figured it out. Most of the people he tells the story to, especially the Captain’s fellow Americans, don’t get it, even when he explains it to them.

“In the end, George just has to accept Ron’s pre-eminence in the oil business because he owns the right land…” Big Al says.

“…and he can’t kill him because that would just expose his earlier altercation with Rick as premeditated murder,” the Captain interrupts to say.

“The most important point,” Captain Don says, choosing his words carefully, “is George should have precluded Rick from taking action by holding a threat over his head, not excluded Rick by killing him. That way he could have kept all his options open and been able to later kill Ron or Rick, or both of them, if he needed to. That’s called ‘diplomacy’.”

“You’ve got it,” Big Al says. “In fact, as it turns out — because of George’s pre-emptive, strike-first, kill-Rick Wild West way of doing it — Ron, without Rick around, actually grows stronger.

“Boy, that George sure made some dumb moves. I wonder if that’s because he’s an American?” Big Al finishes his story.

The Captain disgrees, “I wouldn’t say ‘American;’ I'd say ‘American Cowboy’ is a more apt description. They’re always willing to take on the ‘Bad Guys,’ just like in the movies. The only problem is the world is more complicated than Hollywood would lead you to believe. The Indians aren’t always bad, the cowboys aren’t always white and you need to aim your six shooter to hit something.

“Well, at least,” the Captain continues, “George does get away with one murder. I guess that’s worth some satisfaction, especially for a cowboy, but, gee-whiz, he didn’t even get to scalp the other guy, ehhh?”

The Captain took a few seconds to realize how acclimatized he was becoming in Canada. He has just ended his sentence with an “ehhh?”

Captain Don was lying in his sleeping bag by the fire. The night’s nearby rustlings and far away howls sent shivers down his spine. He fell into a fitful sleep.

The next morning Big Al sprang the news, “We are getting close.” That was all. Those four words were the meager mention of their approach to the lair of the lord.

Chapter 62: The Babe Moves into Bisflats

2008-12-21T07:57:00.010-05:00

The Babe finally persuaded the guards that Captain Don would approve of her being allowed into the sanctuary.

“If you don’t trust me, darling, search me,” The Babe said provocatively. She was not an unattractive woman, especially if you liked that silver-haired, Merry-Widow-Corset sort of look.

One guard did, and, after a thorough going over, let her in the gate.

From then on, The Babe was allowed to come and go at will. She spent most of her time studying the Swallows. Like Dian Fossey with Gorillas and Jane Goodall with Chimpanzees, she initiated her research by just observing the Birds. In the beginning, the Swallows avoided her. Soon, she merged into the background and they tolerated her.

She sat on a lawn chair near Nest Number One, feeling an affinity for Lut, Hala and Nafi because of their common connection, the Boathouse.

Hala was the first to wonder about her presence. “I remembered The Babe from two years ago when we still lived in the Boathouse and — Holy Beelzebub! that seems so long ago — the Squires had come to inspect the property.

“What’s she doing here now?” Hala vowed to find out.

Hala was cautious at first, sitting on the bisflats wall just eyeing the woman as The Babe watched her. Next day, she moved closer, to the limb of a maple tree. The Babe acknowledged her with a version of the “royal wave,” a limp-wrist swivel of the forearm. Like the Queen, who had learned the move from the Queen Mother, she quite correctly assumed Hala was already looking at her and merely wanted to acknowledge her mortal presence without appearing too chummy or seeming to be shooing her away.

Hala understood and appreciated the gesture even though she had never heard of Queen Elizabeth II or the Queen Mother. The Babe noticed how well she responded. That was a good indication of her intrinsic predisposition to pair bonding.

One gesture led to another — “We’re Number One” to “the Peace Sign” to “Hook ‘em Horns” but nary a “Bird.” Within a few days, Hala was perched on The Babe’s shoulder. They were well on their way to becoming the second Cross-Species Pair Bond (CSPB) on earth. Lut and Captain Don, technically, were considered the first, even though the term hadn’t been invented yet when they met.

“CSPB is more than ‘touchy-feely’ stuff,” The Babe liked to say when introducing her concepts at seminars. “It’s becoming involved with another species’ soul, sort of like how all those ‘bodice-ripped’ women feel when they find their ‘ripped-ab’ men in those chick lit classics. It’s when two species can savor what the other is saying without the services of a whisperer; when eye contact, even with a Dog, is non-threatening; when mutual respect is possible without fear of reprimand or favor of treats.

"Yes, it might even include tasting a few insects once in a while.”

The mention of ingesting bugs always got the audience’s attention. The more squeamish would edge towards the exits.

“They weren’t the people I wanted to reach anyways,” The Babe said.

Hala had become sort of a wizard in selecting suitable humans for CSPB. She judged them primarily by their feet.

“Web toes are an obvious giveaway; spindly legs are good too,” she said. “It’s very odd that so many humans think their feet are the ugliest parts of their body,” Hala said.

“I am told it has something to do with people wearing smelly socks and shoes on their feet all day that makes them sweat. I wouldn’t know, but, if true, why don’t people just go barefoot, like me?”

Hala continued, “I automatically reject for pair bonding anyone who tries to hide their lower appendages or even downplays their importance in their lives.”

Hala’s pioneering perspective was to give a whole new meaning to the term “foot fetishism.” People found all sorts of ways to honor their maligned farthest extremities. Reflexology made a much-ballyhooed return to medicine. Club Feet Clubs sprang up in every major city. And bunions soon were considered the new beauty marks of the age. However, the incidence of cut and bruised feet did increase as people tried to follow her advice to go shoeless, even in urban settings were it took some time to develop leathery soles.

Nafi was a total failure at bonding. Humans, ad nauseum, would try to enter his spiritual being, but they all had to quickly retreat. Several refused to ever try again, anywhere, any time, with anyone.

“Hey man, he’s one crazy dude!” was a typical complaint.

CSPB was to foster a major advancement in Human-Swallow relations, the addition of a new Precept to the Holy Five. Forever forward, young Swallows would learn about a modification of Rule Number Three: “Never Tarry with Another Species, but Love Humans as Thyself.”

In keeping with The Babe’s basic tenet, humans had to return the “complement.” It was finally decided that lines eight, nine and 10 of the Lord’s Prayer would read as follows, “Forgive us our trespasses/ as we forgive those humans and Birds/ who trespass against us.”

Hala, Lut and Nafi were mighty proud Swallows to hear about being included in the prayer, even though, technically for Catholics, the changes still had to be voted on and passed by the Vatican Council.

“How difficult could that be?” Nafi, ever the naïf, said.

Chapter 63: Fishing in the Mainstream

2008-12-21T07:56:00.009-05:00

The media were falling right into place. Newspapers, TV stations and Internet sites were dutifully reporting the news from Save Our Boats’ point of view, just like J.P. had predicted.

Interest had waned during the fall and winter as the health threat had receded with the onset of cold weather, but spring, the Bird buffet, the Security Tour, the great debates on the networks’ Sunday talk shows and the Swallows’ release once again stimulated the public’s curiosity.

Trying to speak in terms Norman and his committee members could understand, J.P. explained his news management techniques, “It’s like fishing. All you have to do is bait your hook, cast it into the mainstream and wait to reel them all in.”

The media bit — hook, line and sinker. The New York Post emblazoned it on the front page “Swallows Taught What It Means Not To Migrate.” Channel 21 predicted a surge of tourism for the region as hunters flocked for the first ever Swallow Hunting Season. The right wing Savage Nation radio show and Internet site blamed the Swallows for their own troubles, failing to mention the Birds had been detained against their own will. Host Michael Savage issued forth one of his colorful quotes for which he was known worldwide, “I puke on those Birds.”

Defense Industry Daily in its “Munitions Section” predicted an upsurge in small arms and ammo sales when the season began. “The start of all new wars are golden years for our industry,” it wrote. “Long live armed conflicts. To quote Apocalypse Now: ‘We love the smell of napalm in the morning’ ” (12th most quoted movie line of all time).

All these reports were premature. No governmental body had declared open season on Swallows. The Save Our Boats group had merely proposed it. It would take an act of Congress to make it law.

The New York Times pointed out the indefinite nature of the hunting season proposal in a Page-3 story “Group Seeks Status Change for Swallows.” However, the Times Food Editor apparently did not receive the memo because she ran a section-front-page story, “Four and 20 Swallows Baked in a Pie,” about preparing the Birds in a meal. Undoubtedly, the editor tweaked her nose for that mistake.

Late night comic hosts found lots of humor in the Swallow hunting proposal. They rapid fired jokes about how many crumbs did it take to stuff a Swallow, or how to shoot them with peppercorns instead of buckshot so they can be seasoned on the wing, or how to force the Birds to wear diapers or carry little baggies to catch their own feces before they hit the boats. All these jokes shot around the airwaves and then out into the ether via YouTube.

Television news outlets, a university study later revealed, were more likely than print ones, to go with Swallow hunting season stories. The study speculated it had something to do with the availability of so much VNR footage, provided by J.P.’s stalwart videographers. They sent out clips of the Swallows eating, flying, copulating, defecating, being arrested and serving time in confinement. The study said most of these were good action shots, something news directors craved.

Responding to this surge of information on TV about Swallows and their “dirty habits,” many White Pentecostal churches began to feature Lut, Hala and Nafi in their Sunday sermons. This unholy trinity became unwitting representations of “Unclean Fowl” as found in Leviticus 20:25. These churches were also mindful of the harm Dr. Cleodis T. Cunningham had done to their reputation. By condemning the Birds, they felt they were disassociating themselves from the biobias Black brethren.

As churchgoers, especially White ones, became more aware of the Swallows, local TV stations, ever trying to broaden the demographics of their viewership, especially among 18-35 white householders, became more likely to run the story. One fed off the other. This phenomenon was described in a footnote in the same university study. It was labeled the “Halo Effect.”

Lots of sportsmen were unsure how they felt about the prospects of hunting Swallows. Ducks and Geese, many would secretly admit, were certainly a lot easier to hit. But shooting a Swallow, wouldn’t they look like a bunch of Elmer Fudds as they pumped lead into the air? Gun opponents, always seeking another angle to aim at, pointed out there would be lots of ammo flying around as hunters missed the swift Birds darting about in the sky. The National Rifle Association pooh–poohed this contention, saying there was no need to worry because Americans “were the best marksmen in the world.”

J.P. kept track of all these developments, dashing off emails to those he disagreed with, attaching flyers to those with whom he agreed. He hoped these flyers would be recycled as visual talking points to be posted on bulletin boards across the country.

“What better topic than salmonella poisoning for a viral advertising campaign,” J.P. quipped. The Babe was no longer around to remind him salmonella was a bacteria.

One of J.P.’s flyers depicted boats covered in excrement with the admonishment, “Yours could be next.” Another appealed to fundamentalists, featuring a black outline of a Swallow. Below were these words in 48-point Bookman Old Style: “Remember: The Bible says some Birds are not clean. Deuteronomy 14:11.” Finally, a third catered to parents. From an aerial viewpoint, it showed a pre-teen boy and girl playing on the ground, the shadow of a Bird hovering ominously overhead. The caption simply said, “Are your children safe?”

Chapter 64: Getting Close

2008-12-21T07:55:00.005-05:00

A freak tornado had hit a section of Algonquin Park in the 1970s, devastating a former in holding that had started out as a Spruce Tree plantation. The storm had leveled dozens of acres of the evergreens, all blown down facing in the same direction, a windfall of decaying tree trunks that persists to this day.

“It’s like the whole earth has been canted to its side,” the Captain said when he saw it, nearly tipping the canoe over as he tried to right the world by leaning in the same direction as the tree skeletons.

“That used to be beautiful terrain,” Big Al said. “A forest of Spruce and behind them some giant White Pine.”

“Some people think one of the still-upright trees around here was the inspiration for Tom Thompson’s famous ‘Jack Pine’ painting.”

Big Al, hardly your typical art lover, explained to the non-Canuck Captain about Canada’s most famous painter and his fauvist lone pine set against a frosty lake, snowy mountains and setting sun. Big Al seemed almost misty eyed.

One could only imagine how he would have felt had he known down in the States a cigarette company had stolen the look of the painting to use as artwork for its “refreshingly clean” mentholated product.

Big Al steered the canoe into the beach from where the two could beat a path through the trees. Less than a mile away, he promised, was the dilapidated farmhouse that he suspected had something to do with the Black Flies.

The Captain was relieved they were nearing their quarry. Days of canoeing, days of worrying had taken their toll on him; his butt and heart both ached. While he was sure a little rest could ease his physical pain, he wasn’t as confident he could ever cease his spiritual quandry. The vast forests surrounding him only reminded him of how puny he was by comparison. He understood now why all those explorers in the past had tended to talk about “taming the wilderness.” That was the only way they could come to grips with something that scared them so profoundly.

Big Al had been out here alone with his Dog a decade ago when the usually obedient animal had disappeared into the woods. Big Al searched all day for him before coming upon the farmhouse in the early evening. There, lying on the porch was the poor animal’s body, ripped open from rib cage to tail.

“That was bad enough,” Big Al said as he and Captain Don climbed over, under and ultimately through the fallen spruces. “Inside my dog’s body, Maggots by the millions were crawling through his organs and guts. He couldn’t have been dead more than an hour, his blood was still warm, yet here were these Black Fly Maggots fully formed, squirming all over the place. They usually take weeks to develop, some gestate the whole winter, ehhh?”

Captain Don didn’t know what to say. He hoped Big Al wasn’t just spinning another one of his tall tales.

Chapter 57: The Babe’s Plan

2008-12-14T08:43:00.006-05:00

Babe … errr The Babe… wanted to do something now to halt her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s crazy crusade. With the Captain, according to the SCRWU guards, away for another week, she pondered the possibilities: she could assist the Swallows, she could hinder her husband, or she could drill holes in the head of Lisa Norstrom.

While the last idea was the most appealing, it was also the least practical. As for her obstructing her husband, all those efforts would only bring her into more contact with Norman, not a pleasant thought at all.

Of them all, helping the Swallows was the most rewarding and workable alternative.

The Babe thought long and hard about what to do, “How do you assist animals who, for eons, didn’t need help?” That was a real conundrum, a puzzler far better than any crossword, even The New York Times Sunday one.

The Babe continued to ponder. “If you pumped in money or supplies, people paid to administer them would squander or steal everything. You might even bring down your whole economy as a consequence, and then where would you be? If you set up training programs, they would just seem ridiculous to a group who never needed them before,” she thought.

“What could such training programs do? Teach Swallows how to fly? Teach them how to land in zero visibility? How to endure traversing vast distances?’ she thought. “That was crazy. The Swallows should be teaching humans these skills.”

The Babe continued her riff, “How about nutrition programs? Teach Swallows how to consume a more varied diet? ”Eat fast food? Make pizza?” She began to laugh at her own inability to come up with an answer.

“Hah!” she answered herself again. “The Swallows should be teaching humans how to survive on a minimal macrobiotic insect diet plucked fresh from the sky.”

One by one, The Babe went through the possibilities for teaching programs: government, astrology, democracy — nothing worked!

Out of desperation, she came up with one last, whacky idea.

“What about teaching Swallows about humans and humans about Swallows?”

Drum rolls thundered. The heavens trembled. Lightning struck The Babe squarely in the forehead. Out of the Promethean crucible of her imagination emerged the “Swallow-Human Co-existence Institute for Training (SHCIT).” The acronym serendipitously brought to mind that special substance that got everything started.

To us humans today — and perhaps Swallows as well, although The Babe has taught us never to think for another species — such an institute seems so natural. As with all great ideas, when viewed after the fact, it seemed so “Of course,” so “Elementary, Watson,” so “Obvious.” Denying it was like trying to imagine the world without television, peanut butter without jelly, Tweety and Sylvester without “I tawt I taw a puddy tat.”

It couldn’t be done.

Yet, at the time, it was an innovation of the highest order. Humans had created groups to resolve conflicts among countries, like the League of Nations and the United Nations, but they never worked. Other folks had created groups to protest human exploitation of other animals, like the Humane Society and the SPCA, but their primary missions always seemed to subtly shift from helping animals, to not alienating their primary benefactors, humans.

No, The Babe’s idea was a true union between equals, a sharing of knowledge about each as if both had something to contribute. Not human-watching for Birds, or vice versa; not traditional biology, sociology, or philosophy classes where mankind is presumed to be paramount — The Babe’s Institute would be a meeting place for the two species on terms they both could understand with the notion of bringing the best of their relative and relevant knowledge to the other.

The 19th century father of a local upstate university had once said, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” That’s all The Babe ever wanted for every person and Swallow.