TXTNLY

I attended college not for the traditional lessons of English, Science, Mathematics, or Business. No, I attended college almost expressly for the purpose of getting blind drunk and wasting tuition dollars. It wasn’t until the 5th or 6th time that the University asked me to leave that my parents clued in on this fact and roped my ass back home. In my brief matriculation at said University, I decided that my goal would be to spend my days processing cattle, breaking horses, and cutting the cojones off of baby pigs. Yes, I opted for the Large Animal Veterinary route. Our classes were often spent in the hot sun, being eaten alive by horseflies, and elbow deep in cattle. Literally. Up to our elbows.. in a live animal. I’ll allow your imaginations to fill in the rest of the details. Fortunately, myself and several of my classmates had a deep love for 86 cent beers and 1 dollar pizza slices. As such, we would meet hours before class to prepare ourselves for the afternoon ahead. What I’m trying to say is, we would get super drunk before heading out to the farm.

After a few years of drunkenly roping, herding, and generally molesting animals in the name of science, I felt pretty comfortable with huge farm beasts. Not only was I comfortable with the farmer’s daughters, but the horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs too.

Fast forward a few months, and you would find me taking a ’semester off’ and working to repay some of my squandered tuition (thump, thump). Not being too good for free rent, I was living comfortably in the downstairs floor of my parents’ suburban Atlanta home, and calling it an apartment (thump, thump). One fateful day, I returned from work to find my dog going absolutely ape shit in the back yard (thump, thump). As I navigated the woods towards the source of the barking, something just didn’t feel right (thump, thump). And just what the hell was that drum noise (thump, thump)? Within a few steps, the ridiculous events about to unfold would make themselves apparent. My dog had cornered a large bird. A 7 foot tall bird. An emu. A sense of relief washed over me as I realized that a bird must have escaped from the emu farm a mile through the woods and was simply lost. As you may or may not know, emus make a deep thumping sound when agitated. It doesn’t NOT resemble the drums of war. Upon closer inspection, the bird seemed fairly calm and wasn’t even acknowledging the presence of myself or the dog that had just about finishing barking his lungs onto the forest floor.   Fortunately, I had all kinds of large animal wrangling skills, and I would finally prove to everyone that college had not simply been a drunken waste.

I sprinted to the house to put the dog away and retrieve enough rope to fashion a lasso. Upon my return I found the enormous bird pacing in the same corner of the yard, with battle drum at full tempo and cold black eyes… fixed somewhere in the distance. I brought the lasso up over my head, spinning rings through the air, and cast it toward the errant emu. As the rope crossed the plane of the bird’s view and fell around its neck, everything changed.

Those cold black eyes promptly jerked from their previous destination and locked onto me. The bird lurched forward. Up until this point, I had expected that source of danger from the 7 foot bird would be the huge pointed beak atop its hideously ugly bird face. This opinion changed in milliseconds. With each lunging step, the bird would raise its massively powerful leg above my head and bring it down with enough speed to make a sound that could only be described as tearing the air. I turned tail and ran for my life. By this point, I had made an enemy of the bird, and he had a score to settle. I needed not turn my head to see if the bird was still there, as I could feel the rush of wind as it sliced the air behind me. I sprinted through the woods, hopping fallen trees, ducking branches, getting lots and lots of poison ivy, and the bird was hardly a full step behind me. The sound that introduced itself next was a familiar one, but was nothing I would’ve expected at this point. Ziiiiiiiiiiiing *POP*. Ziiiiiiiiiing *POP*. Bark was exploding off of trees around me, branches were being snapped, and I realized that I was being shot at. After changing my direction of sprint to match the origin of the shots, I laid witness to my father standing on the deck of my house, at least 500 feet away, with a .22 rifle. The subsequent exchange went just about like this:

Me: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!

Dad: DON’T WORRY! I’M AIMING FOR THE BIRD!

Me: THE BIRD IS RIGHT FUCKING BEHIND ME! STOP!

Dad: I’M NOT GOING TO HIT YOU!

Me: STOP FUCKING SHOOTING!!!

Stop shooting, he did not. Apparently, in his desire to bring this situation from a 10 to a full fledged 11, he decided that introducing gunpowder was the best way to up the awesome levels. I disagreed, but I realized that it was a moot point as 3 inch long talons sliced the air behind me, and tiny angry bullets shredded the forest around me. In this moment, I recalled that there was about 10 feet of rope trailing at the end of the lasso. I made a sharp turn between some trees and cut back to flank the bird. I scooped the end of the rope up and began to zig zag through the trees. Once the bird was finally caught up in the web of rope, I tied the end around a tree as the bird flailed and lunged at me.

Full of adrenaline, I ran through the woods toward the emu farm as fast as I could, intent on returning the errant bird to its owners. The driveway was full of cars and I was relieved to know that I would find someone at home. I pounded on the front door and received no answer. I continued frantically ringing the doorbell and beating on the door, until I saw shadows in the foyer of the house. A lady in her mid-thirties opened the door, and at her side stood none other than Spiderman. 3 foot tall, 5 year old Spiderman. I finally managed to explain that I had their bird in the woods, and they needed to come quickly. A look of joy washed over young Spiderman’s face, and his mother explained that she would be right back. It’s just that she needed to tell the other parents and children that they would briefly be leaving Spidertoddler’s 5th birthday costume party, but would be back soon. As we traipsed through the woods, toward my previous battleground, the mother explained that the bird belonged to the boy and had been missing for days. Her son had been quite upset about it, and she was so happy that she would be able to return the bird to him on his birthday.

As we turned the last bend in the woods, we discovered the huge bird in a pile on the ground. It was a shell of its former self. Almost all of the feathers had been stripped from its neck, and that same neck laid in a very unnatural angle on the ground. It was clear that the bird had successfully flailed itself to death. It resisted the rope to the point that it actually broke its own neck. A river of tears erupted from the child. My heart sank. The mother realized just what was occurring before her. And then the police showed up. It struck everyone as a little strange that the police would happen across us in the middle of the woods, but my surprise levels were just about depleted for the day. The two officers on the scene were in a state of amazement. I tried to verbalize everything that had happened, and the child’s mother tried to restore order. It was at that moment that another set of neighbors burst onto the scene. To say that these neighbors were overly dramatic, would be an slight understatement. The officers on the scene wore their concern clearly on their faces.

Neighbor 1: OH MY GOD! THAT GUY WAS ATTACKING THE BIRD! AND HE KILLED IT! AND BRUCE HAS THE WHOLE THING ON VIDEO TAPE!

Neighbor 2: IT WAS HORRIBLE! AND THEY WERE TRESPASSING! I WANT THIS THING OFF OF MY PROPERTY!

Admittedly, I had managed to cross over to their property in my struggle, and this particular property line had been quite the topic of debate in the past. At that very moment, my father strolls up to the scene and things got slightly more out of control.

Neighbor 1: AND HIM!! HE WAS STANDING ON THE DECK SHOOTING AT IT!! HE HAS A RIFLE UP THERE!

Dad: What?!? No! No! I was just standing up there and using my pointing stick! Nooooo! No rifle! I just like to use a pointing stick!

The two officers finally asked the neighbors to return to their home, and informed them that they would stop by before they left. Sans neighbors, the police explained that due to the fact that it was April Fool’s Day, they really thought they were being dispatched to a prank call. The neighbors had been warned of the consequence of prank calling 911 and hung up on, but after 4 or 5 calls, the police finally dispatched someone. So, there we stood, a half dozen people circled around a pile of emu/killing machine. The woman that owned the bird explained that male emus sit on the eggs during gestation, and this particular bird’s egg had not hatched. It was rotting in the nest, and the bird was growing increasingly stressed about its unhatched egg. The owners’ had to flush the bird out of the nest in order to sneak in behind it and remove the egg. After the egg had been removed, the bird began a desperate search for its missing charge. It only took about a day of pacing around the emu enclosure to convince the bird that the egg was not there, and it jumped the fence to exit the enclosure. The fence was 10 feet tall. The bird jumped a 10 foot tall fence. I’m not sure if you caught that. Fence. 10 feet tall. Bird. Jumped fence. This bird was clearly a bad ass death machine hell bent on finding its egg and/or killing everything in its path.

Spidertoddler’s mother actually thanked me for finding her bird and preventing it from making it into the neighborhood. Spidertoddler just sat in a heap and cried his little web slinging eyes out. I tried to make good by offering the child the only thing I could think of, a fruit roll-up. He wasn’t interested. He was more interested in the most horrible birthday present ever,  his dead pet.

The police eventually decided that it would just be best to put a blanket over the bird, and to ask the woman to please recover the body as soon as she was capable. The neighbors were essentially told to get some compassion, and my father and I retreated home to get incredibly drunk.

I never went back there to look for the bird’s body again. I never saw the emu farm owners again. We had plenty of future confrontations with our property-line neighbors, but none so strange as this one. I can only imagine that the boy let the pain fester and will eventually send an army of trained death emus after me.

I do wish I had seen that video tape. I’ll always wonder what happened to it. It’s probably out there on YouTube somewhere. Let me know if you find it!