![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/ZP02.jpg\" "\\"ZP02\\"")
<\/a>This is Zombie Pidge.\u00a0 I encountered him in the wake of a recent night of drinks and snuffles with a few friends down at the Court Jester.\u00a0 One of those friends had suggested something called \u201csaline nasal irrigation\u201d as an alternative to the dilute hydrochloric acid I\u2019d been snorting to keep my cold at bay.\u00a0 It was in the course of seeking out that ancient Indian treatment that I first encountered this little guy huddling inside the outer door of Shopper\u2019s Drug Mart, sheltering from the filthy freezing slush of the Danforth. \u00a0He could not fly, but other than that his demeanor was pretty much indistinguishable from that of any pigeon: not afraid of humans, but certainly not all that keen on being approached or picked up.<\/p>\nYou want a Christmas miracle, kids, here it is: this mutilated bipartite creature connected by sticks and string, waddling furiously into the Cosmetics department in a desperate attempt to keep out from underfoot.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been known to kill the mortally wounded before, to save them suffering. \u00a0I\u2019ve hammered the skulls of unfortunate mice brought in by the Gang of Fur, used a convenient rock to crush the head of the occasional seagull with a broken spine. (The eyes are what bother me most.\u00a0 They\u2019re indestructible. You can hammer a rodent skull to bloody paste and tooth shards, and those beady little eyes bounce back into shape and stare up at you like tiny reproachful superballs.\u00a0 Eyeballs are tough<\/em>.)\u00a0 Usually, though, I don\u2019t have the heart. Unless the wound is obviously mortal I tell myself that maybe they\u2019ll pull through, you never know.\u00a0 I tell myself that at least I can make them comfortable, that at the worst they\u2019ll die warm and safe from predators who\u2019d tear them limb from limb as they thrashed in the mud.\u00a0 I live in a major city: I\u2019ve long since lost count of the urban wildlife to whom I\u2019ve given palliative care and faint hope.<\/p>\n Zombie Pidge was different.\u00a0 This wasn\u2019t just a mortal wound: this was a wound that should have killed the little featherduster in seconds flat.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t for the life of me see how anything so ravaged could still be alive. \u00a0And if this little fucker had made the leap to undead status, who know how long he might last?\u00a0 We were already way off the chart: maybe he might even recover<\/em>.<\/p>\n They didn\u2019t really want him in Cosmetics.\u00a0 I managed to corner him between the lip gloss and a special promotional display for Nip\u2019n\u2019Tuck Home Cosmetic Surgery Accessories. I scooped him up and covered his head to calm him down.\u00a0 The lady behind the counter gave me a little box to put him in (Dove<\/em>, the label read.\u00a0 I shit you not).\u00a0 I took him home on the subway and marvelled at the scrabbling sounds rising from the box, at the subtle inertia of that small mass moving back and forth on my leg.\u00a0 I got him home, set him up in the walk-in closet we generally use for such things. \u00a0(The last pigeon we had in there had some kind of neurological disorder; lasted a couple of weeks and died in mid-spasm, spraying an arc of birdseed across Caitlin\u2019s shoes). I set ZP up with food and water, turned out the light, fell asleep astonished at his continued survival; woke up the next morning to the sound of that undead thing still scrabbling energetically behind the door.<\/p>\n He died around ten that morning.\u00a0 He died warm and safe from predators that would have skewered and stomped him into the pavement with their five-inch stiletto heels.<\/p>\n That\u2019s it.\u00a0 That\u2019s my inspirational Holiday Tale. \u00a0If it doesn\u2019t do it for you, there\u2019s plenty of other blogs and twits out there guaranteed to induce diabetes and swamp you in saccharine, full to the gorge with wishes of peace and love and good fuzzy-wuzzy feelings. But I used to be a biologist before I became a professional liar, and I\u2019m telling you: this<\/em> was a fucking miracle.\u00a0 Or maybe it’s just life.<\/p>\n Either way, it\u2019s good enough for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Apparently this is the day when the blogosphere and the twitterverse and everybody who thinks the world is holding its breath to hear their latest breadfruit recipe weighs in on What Happened This Year and What This Portends for Next Year and how everyone should Dream Big And Hug Someone.\u00a0 If that\u2019s what you\u2019re looking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eulogy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2619"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4648,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619\/revisions\/4648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a>What was remarkable about this bird was not his demeanor per s\u00e9<\/em>, but the fact that he had any demeanor at all.\u00a0 It may not be entirely clear from these pictures \u2014 the little guy was too traumatised to stick his neck out for a better view, given that he\u2019d just endured capture and transport that\u00a0 must have hit him pretty much the way Dave Bowman experienced the light trip at the end of 2001<\/em> \u2014 but this bird had no real neck to speak of. Those white bits are vertebrae. We\u2019re not talking about a deep flesh wound with bone visible at the bottom: we\u2019re talking about the cervical flesh and skin stripped away completely<\/em>, leaving a denuded spine and trachea and esophagus exposed to the winter night. We\u2019re talking about what amounted to a pigeon head and a pigeon body, connected by a length of pigeon skeleton that might as well have been animated by Ray Harryhausen for all the muscles or tendons that I could see.\u00a0 The carotid and jugular vessels (or whatever birds have in their stead) must have been intact \u2014 but I couldn\u2019t make out anything but a bloody windpipe and a few feather-spines and those flensed, impossible vertebrae, bobbing back and forth in typical pigeon fashion as he walked.\u00a0 Bone naked.<\/p>\n