Large Fierce Mammal

This is a whole Blue Jay

Everybody’s heard this riddle

Q: What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?
A: Finding half a worm.

Many years ago I was driving through the Annapolis Valley on a beautiful late summer day. In the car with me were my ex- wife (front passenger seat), her mother (rear right seat), and her mother’s boyfriend (rear left seat). Everybody had expressed an interest in stopping for lunch so I declared that we would stop at the next eatery we found.

I forget where we were exactly, but the road was straight with flat fields on both sides, and I was tooling along at about 90 km/h with all the windows down.

In the field to my right was a solitary tree. As we drew nearer I saw something detach itself from the tree and propel itself with amazing speed in the direction of the highway. As my vehicle converged with the object, it first resolved itself into a medium sized bird before becoming identifiable as a Blue Jay. I judged that we were not on a collision course if the Jay maintained its path, pulled up, or did anything but what it actually did.

I forget the name of the German general who spoke the words, but it was once said, “You will usually find that the enemy has two courses of action open to him, and of these he will choose the third.” The Jay maintained altitude level with the cab of my car until the last moment and then broke into a tight left turn that terminated on the door post separating the front and rear windows on the right side of the car.

Yeah, kind of like that.

There was an amazingly solid THUD as the Jay struck, and then there was blood everywhere I could see in my rear view mirror. I stopped as quickly as I could and turned around to inspect the carnage. Both back seat passengers looked like extras from Carrie, seemingly spray painted with blood. The Jay had broken in two on impact — one half zipping through the space between the backs of the front seats and the faces of the passengers behind, missing everybody, and going straight out the left rear window. The other had passed between the heads of the two back seaters and landed on the deck under the rear window. To make the experience exceptionally cool, both pieces geysered blood and organs all the way through leaving my ex-mother in law’s boyfriend with what appeared to be a segment of intestine dangling from the end of his nose.

Besides the Blue Jay, nobody else was hurt, and I stopped at a gas station so the victims could clean up. No one in the front seat was even touched by a drop of gore, and even though I was still hungry I couldn’t get anyone to express interest in the food they were so desperate for only minutes before.

If there’s one memory my ex-wife still carries about her time with me, I hope this is it.