Gotcha!

            It was just about the middle of December. Forest Keepers don’t do Christmas, but they do sense the turning of the year and then the new year growing larger and larger.

            Days were short. There was quite a bit of snow outside of the Home Clearing. Snow stays politely outside of the clearing in the great forest, because it is a magic place, for lack of a better word. Oh, there are a few artistic whisps here and there. To make it pretty.
            Dawn was late, but it finally came. Up between the tree tops, pink clouds glowed. A frigid little wind puffed up its cheeks and drifted in and then out again.
            This scene of wintery serenity was not to last.
            “Ralph! I caught one!” The voice echoed through the trees. It was Maeve.
            She was struggling with something as she flew. It had red and white lights flashing and creating colorful blasts of light on tree trunks and earth below.
            This piece of equipment, about twice her size, hung from her claws. One of its rotors continued to turn. It pulled futilely against her powerful wingbeats. The struggle continued as she came in for a landing near the fire circle.
            Once she had the thing on the ground, using her great curved beak, she tore the final rotor apart. It ceased pulling or trying to take off.
            “Ralph,” she screamed, “I brought you one of those things!” And she just kept hollering while the contraption flashed its lights in desperation.
            Not even Ralph can sleep through that much Raven screaming. He rose before Ramona, even, to see what all the excitement was about. He exited the cave scratching his tummy and yawning, being very careful to shut the door behind himself.
            “Oh! Mavie, my old black leg, what have you got there?” said Ralph all agog, but fascinated. He saw that it continued to struggle a bit, so he put his foot on it and bent down to get a good look. It writhed and squirmed nastily.
            “Explain, Birdie,” said Ralph.
            “I figure they are Manmade birds, Ralph. They have been flying back and forth in front of my nest and keeping me awake at night with those blinking lights. I know they’re strange for birds. They have four sets of wings, no head really, or I would have bitten it off, you can be sure!  I had to break its wings to slow it down!
            “They come in different sizes too. Some are like cows! With lights. Not really like cows, but big enough to be cows.
            “They don’t make much noise, their wings whirr, but they make some kind of almost noise. You can’t ignore them. Well, I can’t anyhow! So I wrecked one and brought it to you to figure out.”
            “#126, type0,grounded. Requesting assistance,” said the thing on the ground.
            “It has a voice. Hmm,” said Ralph, turning it over to look at the bottom.
            Maeve hopped up close, beak at the ready. The lights continued to flash in patterns of red and white.
            “I think we should kill it, Ralph. Before its friends come to rescue it, and you sure don’t want them in here! Can you imagine?” said Maeve.
            “I wonder where its brain parts are, Birdie. Maybe near the voice….Hmmm.”
            With all this fuss and bother going on outside, Ramona finally arrived with her Bic, in case the fire had gone clear out.
            “What are you two looking at there,” she said. “What is it?”
            “We aren’t sure what it’s for,” said Ralph, “but it did call for help. Maeve caught it up by her nest in the cliffs. She says there were a lot of them keeping her awake at night.”
            “I say it’s a flying camera, Ralph,” said Ramona, rather more firmly than she usually spoke to him. “Look for its eye, the lens part, Ralph!”
            Ramona picked up a rock from around the fire and joined the two examining the thing lying there blinking.
            “That round window there is its eye,” she said, then proceeded to smash it with her rock.
            It screamed out “#126, type0,grounded. Requesting assistance!”
            “Oh no you don’t,” said Ramona and went back to work with her rock. When she was finished the whole middle section was flattened and the lights were dark.
            “Evermore!” remarked Maeve.
            “Yeah,” said Ralph.
            “You have to get it away from us and bury it, Baby. This thing is not part of our world,” said Ramona. “In fact, why don’t you throw it in the dumpster down by the parking lot? I don’t think it can connect anymore, but what do I know? Take it away!”
            Then she went back to building her fire back up for morning.
            Ralph gathered up the broken thing, making sure to get all of its bits and pieces. Then he and Maeve set out for the parking lot. Ralph had to break a path through some pretty serious snow. Maeve rode on his shoulder.
            On the way, Ralph asked  her, “how exactly did you catch this thing? It seems like those whirly things would have hurt you. I’m having trouble imagining the capture.”
            “I did most of it with sticks. When I decided to catch one, I got the biggest stick I could carry and waited in my nest. When one flew by rather low down, I dropped the stick on it.  That killed one wing. It started spinning around. So while it was busy I pulled a big stick out of my nest quickly. Then I flew up over it and dropped that stick on it.  It took out another whirly wing thing.  Then the thing stopped spinning, but it started to fly really slow and low.
            “I followed it for a while, before sunrise, just following those lights. Then I decided a rock might be better. So I grabbed the biggest rock I could carry and smashed the third wing by dropping it from a little bit above. Well, then it couldn’t really fly, so I just grabbed it and took off for the clearing. You know what happened then!” said Maeve.
            “I wonder what they’re for,” said Ralph, stepping high through knee height snow.
            “Me too,” said Maeve. “But now that one is just garbage.” She giggled. Ravens do giggle.
            “I’ll ask Millicent one of these days, “ said Ralph. “She probably knows something.”
            When they got to the dumpster by the parking lot, Ralph pushed a bunch of snow off of the lid. He dug around inside the dumpster, moving stuff around so he could bury the broken thing in there. When it looked OK, he shut the lid and headed back out the same way he had come. He messed up his footprints while he was walking back. It was just his normal practice.
            “I hope they stop flying around my nest. Maybe this will scare them away,” said Maeve, complacently.
            “Yeah, maybe,” said Ralph.
            Behind them, they heard the garbage truck arrive and grab that dumpster and pour the contents into itself.
            “There is goes,” said Ralph. “Yup,” said Maeve.
            Arriving back at home, they saw that Ramona had fried a lot of potatoes and eggs, and that she was boiling something in a tall blue enameled pot.
            Whatever she was boiling smelled very interesting, but unfamiliar.
            She looked up at the returning heroes, and said, “look what Thaga gave me!”
            Ralph and Maeve did look at it.
            “What is it?” asked Ralph.
            “It’s a coffee pot!  I made coffee for breakfast!”