I Saved Canada by Roy Berger 2,825 words complete

I Saved Canada by Roy Berger copyright, Dec. 30, 2013

   I always get a bit nervous telling true stories involving Canadian National Security but I'll tell you this one. It was 12:08 PM. It was Sunday, five days later, the first Sunday after September 11, 2001. It was an otherwise nice, warm afternoon. I mean it looked like the world had just gone to war and we were about to be invaded by invisible phantoms, but it was a nice day.

   The back door was open leading into the kitchen from the yard letting the dog run back and forth. I was having a coffee and freshening up a bit while listening to a local university student radio station, CKUT FM from McGill. My work day started in an hour.

   J.D., the news anchor, had just reported that, "...in the past two weeks, two thirds of all the cats on the North Eastern sea-board and South-Western Ontario have died of a 24 hour flu..." Bang! Just like that and on to another fast breaking story and another in a continuous flow of fast breaking stories in the brand new post 9/11 world.

   You may remember how it was during those first few days and weeks. Everyone in North America, if not the world, was hyper-vigilant, nervous, literally looking up in the sky. What's next? Who is next? Do we know who our friends are? We were straining to understand the shadow of fallen towers. All kinds of news was breaking. Reality was having its cover story blown on line, off line, on the sidewalk, in newspapers, on radio and espirit de corridor. False alarms were being called in by the hundreds. Many news stories were only heard once. Most of it was shocking, some demoralizing and now... the cats. I wrote the reporter's name down on a scrap of paper along with the exact time just as a reality check. I knew her once when she worked at The Link. Maybe the CRTC would have a copy of her audio for historians.

   I had to open the store shortly. I needed a smoke. "The cats." I was upset about the cats. It was a big deal. I remembered being the first in my circle to hear about the World Trade Centre attacks in New York and the Pentagon just five days earlier. I called people to wake them up, to turn on their television sets at 8:30 in the morning; how disbelieving they were of another 'Roy' story. My coffee was getting cold. I left the house and went to the comer to pick up a pack of smokes.

   Just beside the corner store, along the edge of the sidewalk, resting on the boulevard of grass, lay a squirrel. Its body was near the base of a telephone pole in that little meridian between the sidewalk and the road. I leaned in to look a little closer. The squirrel looked fine, except it was dead. Its coat of fur was clean, black and glossy. I didn't see any pebbles or crap ground into it. There were no electrical burn marks, tire treads or blood. It looked like a fine, healthy, slick, fat adolescent squirrel. Probably even a good Catholic squirrel for all I knew.

   There was a church right across the street and as I said it was a Sunday.  The church had a big statue of the Virgin Mary holding her arms up to the sky. The parishioners would be filing out shortly. I didn't think the dead squirrel would be a very nice thing for them to see. We'd all seen so much death that week. I could still feel the vacuum of so many thousands of souls leaving at once. I bought my smokes and asked the de pannier clerk for a plastic bag to put the animal in. He gave me a couple of bags. I lifted the corpse in, tied the bags in a knot and placed the poor little thing on top of a near by trash can.

   I went back home, nuked my coffee and ripped opened the pack of smokes. The world was nuts. They had killed the cats. Some mystery tester virus had killed the cats and at best we'd be over run with rats and mice and black plague fleas would surprise us behind door number two.

   The squirrel. What if that fresh, clean, no reason to be dead squirrel was part of an epidemic? The more I thought about it, it was obvious. It was pretty clear that was the case. It was connected. A West-Nile style virus or weird cat flu thing - it made no sense. It had to have happened prior to the World Trade Centre bombing - the perpetrators had already dropped the second shoe. This was part of it. It would be death by a thousand cuts. They were going to kill off all the felines and leave us to the mercy of a flood of noxious mice, fleas and rats as big as dogs. The squirrel though. Its death had to have just happened and if the terrorists were now killing all our squirrels, like they did the cats, then it would probably start just like this, in a community just like this. Those bastards! The madness. The panic. In my mind I could see the TV images of all those dust covered people walking across Brooklyn Bridge in a bewildered escape from Manhattan.