One
of my friends when I was younger told me that if you split a birds
tongue that you could teach it to talk. I did not know what split a
tongue meant but I knew what birds were so I reasoned that I could
start there and then figure out the rest. I devised all sorts of
stratagems to capture a wild bird. But the one I settled on was to
borrow a friend of mine's pump up pellet gun and shoot one with a
tranquilizer dart. The main flaw in that plan was that I did not have
a tranquilizer dart. So what I did was I bought some pellets and
epoxied a needle to the front of it because a tranquilizer dart has a
needle. At the time I was unaware that the needle on a real
tranquilizer was hollow and filled with tranquilizer. I guess I
assumed that the needle did the work by stunning the animal or
something. I made up a about ten of these ammunition and then
sterilized them in alcohol to make sure and minimize the risk of
infection. Then I went over to my friend Chris's house. He was only
vaguely my friend but he did have a pump up pellet gun and parents
that would not ask too many question so the situation was ripe for
our friendship to blossom. I went over early in the morning and we
headed out along the canal where there were lots of birds and I tried
a few shots with my ersatz tranquilizers it turned out that they did
not have exactly perfect ballistics which is odd because I very
carefully glued a needle to a pellet it should have flow true and
strait and brought down my quarry with ease, exactly like it had in
my fantasy about this very thing. All ten did not work or even come
close. So my plan shifted a hair to the more dangerous. My new plan
was to take regular bb's and shoot the bird, nurse it back to health,
and then find out about the tongue splitting thing. The first part of
the plan, namely shooting and injuring a bird went off without a
hitch. Then we got a shoe box with grass in it for phase two; the
healing. That part did not go as smoothly and the bird was making a
lot of noise. My friend's dad heard it and asked what we were doing
with that damn bird. We told him the plan and he decided to end the
experiment at phase two by breaking the birds neck with his hands. I
was really sad but at least I was able to realize that maybe Chris
and his family were not a good ideological match for me friendship
wise.
