Fred, “my Hillbilly Buddy”, when I think of some of the shenanigans the two of us perpetrated, I’m surprised we are both still alive and/or not on jail. What follows isn’t our typical craziness (like turning gunpowder into noise) but it is severely bizarre.
I suppose I could start at this very fittingly with “once upon a time” except this is all true, myself being an eyewitness. But because of the nature or of our past escapades (Fred and myself) a fairytale beginning would be most appropriate (but all of what follows actually happened).
So, once upon a time my hillbilly buddy and is hillbilly brother were tearing down an abandoned hillbilly house. The house they found out was not totally uninhabited, low and behold what do they find? Under the porch is a buzzard’s nest and in the buzzards nest is a little baby buzzard!
Just in case you don’t know what a baby buzzards looks like (which you probably don’t) they are little white fuzzballs (that’s right, white, not black). This particular little critter was about the size of the pigeon; the baby buzzard looked at Fred and goes goink-goink-goink.
A momentary digression, if you are an ornithology person and you are about to relegate this entire story to the realm of el poop-poo de toro (because of an anatomical peculiarity of buzzards, namely, they don’t have vocal cords), yes I will concede, buzzards don’t goink…they don’t cheep, they don’t chirp. The “goinks” a baby buzzard goinks are beyond the limit of my literary expertise to reduce to writing. Here is what I CAN say: In the forgoing sentence, the first goink is a noun; the second is a verb. If you envision a little chick going cheep-cheap-cheap, etc.
the baby buzzard is doing the same thing only different (use your imagination).
Fred picks the little critter up cupped in his two hands “Quote the Buzzard”, goink-goink-goink. I suppose that could be translated from buzzard talk to English (hillbilly) as “Daddy”. Fred and his brother have absolutely brilliant idea. Fred has four year old son. Everybody else will get a dog or cat for their kids, so Fred and his brother take the baby buzzard home and give it to his son as a pet (hey these people are hillbillies).
They get the critter home and Fred’s wife Cindy says “Oh how cute, a baby buzzards” I suppose baby buzzards are cute (baby everything elses are cute) they don’t turn black until they are about the size of a chicken. Fred’s four year old falls in love with the little fuzzball. Daddy! We are going to keep him, aren’t we? Well thought of course son!
Cindy: Fred…where are we going to keep that thing?
Fred: Well Cindy, we can keep him with the dogs.
(Every hillbilly has dogs, Fred had three or 4, one was a puppy)
Cindy: What if it flies away
Fred: Well then he just flies away and that’s that
Cindy: What are we going to feed the critter?
Fred: What you mean…the critter is a buzzard!
So they put the buzzards out with the dogs and the little white fuzzball eats what the dogs eat. This is not what you would expect to see on some documentary nature program. First, the buzzard does not fly away. At the time they found him he had not yet learned to fly…that did not take too long. Second, the dogs think he is one of the puppies and the puppy thinks he is one of the dogs. The buzzard and the dogs get along just fine.
Remember that the setting of all of this is the outback of Northern Kentucky, it takes about a month and the buzzard is full-grown. Again, Fred and Cindy DO NOT have him in a cage, he grew up with the dogs, the critter followed Fred and Cindy around JUST LIKE one of the dogs they even petted him just like one of the dogs. Fred’s son is the envy of the entire surrounding, the only kid to have a pet buzzard…and not on a leash, and not in a cage.
This episode about the buzzards you had to see to believe, I saw this, this really happened as best I can describe it. I would go over Fred’s on the weekends and we would go out in the woods. As usual the dogs would come along to…and the buzzards! But, the buzzard could not walk as fast as us and the dogs, so, what he would do is wait until we were about 50 yards ahead and then just fly to catch up.
The end of the story, if I had not heard it directly from Cindy and cross examined her about it, I would dismiss as a hallucination. She even admits that she thought she was draining and had to do a double take to assure herself that she really was awake.
Fred is always on an overnight and the time this happened we were both flying for the same start up commuter airline (both of us are pilots).
Cindy gets up in the morning and lets the dogs outside. They lived in a trailer along one of the ridges in Northern Kentucky. The trailer had a front yard about three times the width of the trailer and about one and a half times its length; the front yard had a ranch style post and beam fence.
What follows is as verbatim from Cindy as I can remember. She wakes up, lets the dogs out and sees a somewhat unusual sight (“somewhat” is an underestimate). Sitting along the fence she estimates to be about twenty buzzards (20 so as not to think this is a misprint). She does a double take…she assures herself that she is really awake and that this is not a dream. The pet buzzard is in the middle of the front yard facing them, one by one the fence sitting buzzards start to fly away.
She still thinks this is so bizarre that she is dreaming, she goes back inside just to shake her head. After she pours herself a cup of coffee and takes a sip (just to make absolutely sure she is awake) she looks back outside. All the buzzards are gone and the pet buzzard is going too, that is the very last they ever saw the buzzard.
The next time I went over Fred’s she relates the above episode to me. The buzzard is gone so there is no real doubt over her story, but Cindy…how many buzzards did you say were on the fence? Actually, it was after this cross examination that we came up with about 20. She says “Allan”, we go outside and she points to the places where she says the buzzards were preached, she says from their to their, indicating with both hands where they were. She says, “There were three buzzards sitting between all the fence posts except write there”, she continues, “Between those two posts there were only two”.
The space of the fence she indicated had eight posts. So that meant there were seven fence beams for the buzzards to perch on.
If there were three on all of them but one, and on the one exception there were only two, that would add up to 3×6 = 18 plus 2 totals 20! She will admit (even after our scientific, empirically correct calculations) that she is not absolutely sure about 20. After scratching our chins over this, if it were less than 20 it would be only three less, and that’s still is a whole bunch of buzzards.
So that is the story of the buzzard. This is not the only animal story I could tell about Fred. The other one is about the raccoons, but that’s a whole ‘nuther story.
As well as I can remember, they never named the critter, they just called him “Buzzard”…Quote the Buzzard, goink-goink-goink. (I have pictures of this, I should have taken more).
I do not have a high regard for “cover letters”. Why? I know, that whomever they are sent to knows, that whatever exalted sounding grandiloquence is presented…is so much el poop-po de Toro. So here is my resource box (aka cover letter), I write My Writers Portfolio, I do photography, My Photography Portfolio
Other informative websites you may like:
The Investment Tipper – Economic and financial news, investment strategies and tools.
The American Real Estate Observer – Updated information on real estate and housing in the United States.
IELTS-Pass – Preparing for the IELTS exam test.
Your Pet Basket – A whole site dedicated to pets.
Related UFO Documentary Articles
Definitely Not a Nature Documentary
No comments:
Post a Comment