“The capybaras aren’t the only animals that have gotten out lately; they’re just the latest,” Vivian said as they walked to the main operations building in the middle of the zoo. “First, half of the chickens in the kid’s petting zoo disappeared in March. Later that same month, the peacocks were found at the bandshell halfway across the park. In April, they found the wallabies in the off-leash dog area. The zoo was able to keep it all quiet until the capybaras escaped in May.”
“Where did you hear that?” Mason asked.
“Sources in the zoo, and rumours from park-goers who arrived early enough to see the other escapees. I’ve gotten some tips and followed up on a few leads over the past two weeks,” Vivian said. “Plus, there have been sightings of the chickens all over the park, as well as zoo employees hearing clucking in back hallways of the zoo offices.”
“So, we’re looking for leprechauns, or some kind of chicken-people. Got it,” Mason said, rolling his eyes. He gestured to the information plaques they passed on the way. “Whoever’s doing this, they’ve got a pattern. They seem to be targeting successively larger animals every time.”
“Let’s just hope they stop,” Vivian said, jerking her thumb toward the bison enclosure. “Imagine the havoc if those big guys got out.”
A short blonde woman in a zoo uniform and large eyeglasses held up a hand at the entrance to the operations centre, next to the yak pen.
“Sorry, folks, no access to the public past this point. If you’re looking for washrooms, the nearest ones are ahead at the Grenadier Cafe or back by the Adventure Playground,” she said.
Vivian flashed a smile and extended a business card to the woman. “I’m Vivian Bacall, freelance journalist. I’m here to investigate some strange sightings, and—”
Eyes wide, the other woman never gave her a chance to finish. “Oh my goodness, it’s really you! How did I not recognize you from your blog?” she said, bouncing in place. “I’m such a big fan, I must have read everything you’ve written, and now you’re here. At my zoo. Well, not my zoo, but I work here. I wish it was my zoo. I’d love to own a zoo. I’m Claire. Vivian Bacall is at my zoo!”
“Er, yes,” Vivian said. “I was hoping to look around and ask some questions about the animal escapes over the past few months. And this is my assistant.”
“I’m not her assistant,” Mason said, reaching out for a handshake. “Mason Shaw, chief investigative reporter for the Cross-Canada Observer.”
But Claire had already turned away, leading Vivian into the building.
“We’re the largest independent news outlet in the country,” Mason said to a nearby yak through the fence. The yak remained impassive.
A few hours and several interviews later, the evidence was piling up in Vivian’s favour; cell phone photos of more tiny bootprints, blurry security camera footage of chicken-like shapes in dark hallways, and a triangular red flag smaller than a gum wrapper that had been found tied to a twig near the wallaby enclosure.
“That’s not all,” Claire told them in the main office. “When we found the peacocks and wallabies, they weren’t just hanging out where we found them. Both times, the animals each had one foot tied to something.”
“As if whoever put them there wanted to send a message,” Mason said. “But when they set Bonnie and Clyde free, the capybaras escaped. Are they sending a different message, or did their prank get out of hand this time?”
“I just hope they stop,” Claire said. “The animals haven’t been hurt yet or hurt anyone else, but if they start messing with the larger animals like the reindeer or Skippy the bison, that could change in a hurry. And if those chickens on the cameras are the ones from the petting zoo, they’re acting really weird. Too coordinated for normal chicken behaviour.”
Vivian stood in thought for a few moments. The capybara escape was almost exactly a month ago. If the culprits stuck to their pattern, they’d return to the zoo soon, and release larger animals when they did. Looking at Claire, Vivian realized she had an opportunity.
“Claire, can I ask you for a big favour?” she said with a smile.
“For you, Miss Bacall? Anything!” Claire answered immediately.
The park was quiet when Vivian and Mason returned after dusk wearing dark clothing and long sleeves for stealthy work. Mason carried a duffel bag with surveillance equipment he often used for covert reporting: night-vision cameras, motion triggers, directional microphones, and more. Vivian thought of herself as reasonably tech-savvy, but the gadgets were Mason’s expertise and she was grateful for his help with them. A laptop would collect and save all the data in high resolution, and display a lower-quality feed from the cameras on-screen to help them spot trouble while still saving processing power.
“I’m telling you, we’re going to find a bunch of teenagers with too much time on their hands,” Mason whispered.
“You still think it’s kids after seeing the miniature tracks?” Vivian asked.
“Farm kids make crop circles all the time; all you need is a board and some rope, and you can duck-walk through a field to make whatever design you want,” Mason said. “My brothers and I made loads of them growing up. These kids just have overshoes with little footprint shapes on the bottom or something.”
“What are those for?” Vivian asked, pointing at a pair of thick construction gloves in the bag.
“Just in case these jokers let something out and we need to help wrangle it,” Mason said. “Ever been bitten by a horse? I’m betting a llama bite isn’t any fun either.”
Claire met them at the same wooden signpost where they’d entered the zoo earlier that day, to unlock the rolling gate that was put up at night to deter after-hours visitors. Mason set up his equipment to capture any movement in the animal pens, and the three of them split up.
Vivian took position at the south end of the zoo, Mason in the middle and Claire at the north end. Vivian watched the llamas sleeping in the pen across from her, ears alert for any sounds in the dark around her. Before long, her walkie-talkie crackled.
“Miss Bacall, this is Claire, do you copy?”
“Vivian here, I copy,” she whispered back.
“All clear by the reindeer pen so far,” Claire said. “I just wanted to say how cool it is to be helping you with a story. Over.”
Vivian chuckled and shook her head before pressing the talk button again. “Thank you Claire, you’ve been great,” she said. “Um, over.”
“Do you think this one is going up on your blog, or do you have a magazine in mind to send it to?” Claire asked. “I bought a year’s subscription to What’s Happening when I found out they were running a piece from you about the Leslieville Hum. Over.”
“I really haven’t decided yet, it partly depends on what we find out tonight,” Vivian said.
“Ladies, as much as I love talking shop, the perpetrators will probably overhear us if they come back tonight,” Mason’s voice cut in. “Maybe we can continue this conversation later. Over.”
“Right, sorry. Over,” Claire said. “I just got excited—oh, not over. Un-over. I got excited to be—hang on, I hear something.”
Vivian waited for an update, but the radio remained silent.
“Claire? Claire, come in,” she said.
There was no response.
“Viv, I’m going to go check on her. Over,” Mason said. About a minute later, he spoke again. “She’s not at her position, but I see signs of a struggle. Her walkie is here, and… feathers?”
Mason was interrupted by a strange noise. In the speaker of Vivian’s radio, it sounded almost like clucking and high-pitched laughter.
“Mason?” she said. “Mason, come in. Do you copy?”
The radio remained silent.
Vivian suddenly felt very alone. Her instinct for self-preservation screamed at her to leave the zoo, but she couldn’t abandon Mason or Claire to whatever had found them in the dark. She crept through the trees to Mason’s original position and found his laptop tucked under a blanket
to hide the glare of the screen.
The motion-activated video feeds were grainy and the slow refresh speed gave a strobe-light view of the animal pens. There was no time to check the high-quality footage on the hard drive. White blurry shapes flashed across the screen; they moved low to the ground, coming in from both ends of the zoo and converging on the bison pen. As the frames updated, one of the feeds showed Claire being dragged across the ground behind a group of the white shapes, moving toward the zoo operations building.
Vivian knew Mason could handle himself; he’d survived reporting from dangerous situations before and come out the other side, sometimes with a black eye or broken arm, but always alive. She crept out into the gloom of the zoo towards where the mysterious blurs had taken Claire.
She found the door ajar and the building dark. On the floor, a smear of mud—at least, Vivian hoped it was mud—showed where the mysterious things had dragged Claire. Vivian bent down to inspect it and found several white feathers adhered to it. The marks led her to a four-way intersection under a flickering emergency light, the first illumination she’d found inside the building.
Vivian stopped.
The sound of claws tap-tap-tapping against the tiled floor came from around the corner, where the mud trail faded away into darkness. Light gleamed off of three pairs of animal eyes emerging from the shadows. The tapping grew closer, and revealed a trio of chickens.
Vivian might have laughed if not for the passengers. Sitting astride each chicken was a humanoid creature maybe six inches tall, with squat pear-shaped bodies and long thin limbs. Their round heads were covered in closely-cropped fur, except for bald patches on the front where broad-featured faces leered at her. The tiny men, one with ginger fur and the other two with brown, wore what looked like rags and plaid fabric stitched together along with helmets made from bottle caps. The helmets perched above protruding ears on the sides of their heads, and each carried a spear fashioned from nails on the ends of pencils or pens.
“Another Lurg!” the ginger one cried in a squeaky Scottish accent. “Charge!”
All three riders surged forward on their chickens with spears at the ready. Vivian’s only option was to abandon the pursuit and run. She plunged into a lightless hallway, darting around a corner, but her foot caught an unseen wire, and she fell hard.
“Got her!” said another high-pitched Scottish voice. “Quick, the bag!”
Rough cloth covered Vivian’s head.
When the bag came off, Vivian was supine on the dirt floor of a large utility shed. Ropes criss-crossed her body, held down tight to the ground on either side of her with wooden pegs with just enough slack to turn her head. She was briefly reminded of reading Gulliver’s Travels as a girl, but then noticed she wasn’t alone.
“Claire! Claire, are you okay?” she asked.
“Oh hi, Miss Bacall!” Claire said, groggy and with her glasses askew but still chipper. “I’m alright, I think I bumped my head. I’ve been seeing tiny men riding chickens around? I might have a concussion.”
“Viv? That you?” Mason said from her other side. His feet were next to Vivian’s head, but otherwise all three of them seemed to have been tied down the same way.
“It’s me. What happened?” Vivian asked.
“What happened, my great wee Lurg friends,” said a voice near her head, “is that ye’ve been captured by Clan Dundoogle!”
The ropes offered just enough give for Vivian to turn her head to face the source of the voice. It was another of the six-inch men on chickenback. This one had thick streaks of grey in the fur on his head and a bald patch on the top, and his clothes seemed to be made of finer scraps than the others. Tucked into the back of his plaid sash, a single peacock feather nearly doubled his height. If Vivian had to guess, he would be the group’s leader.
“It was leprechauns after all, and they got the jump on us,” Mason grumbled. This was followed by a swift thwack and Mason uttering profanity.
“There’s no such thing as leprechauns, ye daft turd-wit!” the leader exclaimed. “We’re Sprootlings, people o’ the heather, the proud chicken-riders of the Highlands! And the three of ye stand guilty of interfering with the Herdening!”
“Sprootlings?” Claire asked.
“Nae, not ‘Sprootlings,’ SPROOTLINGS!” the leader said with a deep frown.
“That’s what she said, ‘Sprootling,’” Vivian pointed out.
“Nae nae nae, Sprootlings! Sprootlings!”
“Oh!” Vivian said. “Sproutlings! You’re called Sproutlings?”
“Aye! That’s what I said, ye great walloper!” he said.
“Sproutling or Sprootling or whatever, we don’t know what you’re talking about. We were just trying to learn who’s been letting animals loose from the zoo,” Mason said. “Viv, you’ve gotten us into it again. Just like in Calgary.”
Vivian’s ears perked up. She and Mason had gotten into enough weird situations before to work out a simple code, and “Calgary” was the signal for one of them to keep somebody talking. She needed to provide a distraction for whatever Mason was up to.
“Chief Dundoogle,” she said, guessing at the little man’s title, “I have to admit that I’ve never heard of a Sproutling before. How did you come to be in Canada?”
“Deception and trickery!” the chief roared. He spurred his chicken into pacing back and forth. “My clan used to dwell in the Highlands near a Lurg village called Oldmeldrum, where the Lurgs bottle their firewater and tend their sheep. I was leading a raid on the distillery with aboot half the clan, but the Lurgs had set a trap for us. They stole our chickens, tied us up, and stuffed us into the firewater crates!”
“And you were sent overseas in a whisky shipment,” Vivian reasoned. “That must have been a rough journey.”
“Aye, many of us still bear the bruises of being knocked aboot by the bottles, but we survived, and found our way here!” the chief declared. “Ye cannae keep a Dundoogle doon!”
“But why release the zoo animals?” Vivian asked.
“Yeah, why the animals?” Claire repeated in a daze. “You didn’t eat any, and it looks like you kept the chickens.”
“We get food enough from hunting squirrels and raiding Lurg cupboards,” Chief Dundoogle said. “The Herdening is a matter of honour and bravery. We’ve had two successful Herdenings since coming here, and only the most recent one went awry. The great fat rabbit-things got away, and t’was a great shame on my youngest son Whispit.”
Vivian couldn’t tell if “Herdening” was another case of her misunderstanding the Chief’s accent or another Sproutling word like “lurg”. Whatever it was, it seemed to be the reason behind the animal escapes.
“You tried to Herden Bonnie and Clyde?” Claire said before Vivian could ask for more details about what the Herdening even was. “That’s so mean.”
The ginger Sproutling who had ordered the charge at Vivian stepped forward.
“I’ll do ye proud tonight, Pa!” he said. “These chickens are soft, not trained at all when we found them, but they’ll learn. And the humpbacked horned thing will be my triumph!”
“You can’t let Skippy out!” Claire cried, the notion breaking through her mental fog. “If he gets away, people could get badly hurt! Heck, you could get hurt just from trying!”
Suddenly, Mason lurched to a standing position, his pocketknife open in his hand and severed ropes falling away beneath him. Drawing up to his full height he flung his arms open and shouted at the Sproutlings around them, spooking the chickens and sending the room into chaos as the riders tried to get their inexperienced mounts under control again. Mason took advantage of the opportunity to free Vivian and Claire, and they ran from the utility shed.
“We always have such a great time in Calgary,” Mason said, taking Vivian’s arm. “Let’s grab our stuff and skedaddle.”
“You can’t go. They’re still going to try and take Skippy!” Claire said.
Mason looked at Vivian in exasperation, but he grunted
and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Fine. We’ll do this the hard way. But Claire, I’m going to need to borrow your glasses,” he said, pulling his thick construction gloves out of his pocket.
“Why?” Claire asked.
Frantic clucking and vaguely Scottish noises grew louder in the utility shed as the chicken-riders and Chief Dundoogle approached.
“Just hand them over and get back,” Mason insisted. He put them on as well as the gloves, and stood at the ready by the door.
Yelling and laughing, the Sproutlings burst out of the door. Several of them threw their spears at Mason, but they got caught in his clothes or bounced harmlessly off his gloves. Two in the rear produced longbows—long compared to the archers themselves, at any rate—and peppered Mason’s face with arrows. Although some drew blood from scratches on his cheeks, Claire’s borrowed glasses protected his eyes.
“My turn,” Mason growled.
Vivian saw him lunge forward and grab a pair of Sproutlings by the midsections, lift them clear off their chickens, and toss them at another two of their comrades. He shouted again and spooked the mounts of the archers at the door, sending their chickens squawking back into the shed. Vivian yelled to warn him about another rider coming up to spear Mason in the shin; that Sproutling was also lifted off his chicken and tossed onto the roof for his trouble.
“Is he winning?” Claire asked, squinting in the general direction of the battle.
“Oh yes,” Vivian replied with a smile.
Finally, Mason seemed to spot an opening.
With a grand dive and roll through the dirt, he stood holding the struggling chief firmly in both hands.
All the Sproutlings who still had any fight in them immediately stopped.
“That’s enough!” Mason called out. “Now we can have a civil conversation without any spears or arrows, or we can find out how Lurgs in Canada treat Sproutlings who tie them to the ground. Deal?”
“Say your piece, then release my Pa!” yelled the chief’s ginger son, Whispit.
CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories Page 16