Shooting Archeopteryx Again

I can hear the sound of guns and the great squalls of noise from the flying creatures.  It is Glen Applebee and his men shooting archeopteryx again.

They’ve had the place to themselves for long enough. It was only a generation or two ago that we realised that the archeopteryx were dinosaurs and that they’d been on this earth for a hundred and fifty million years.  It’s time for mankind to make a stand.  We’re the up and coming species let them move aside.  That’s what Glen Applebee says, anyway.

The taking of the child earlier this year was the catalyst.  We took them for granted.  They lived on the cliffs and on the foreshore feeding off pleisiosaurs and ichtyosaurs from the deep.  Let them, we thought.  They do no harm to us.  But they took up a huge amount of real estate.  As do all dinos.  They’re all big.  Big and lumbering.  So Glen Applebee and people like him have cleared most of the countryside of the big thumping brutes and we can live without the fear of being stamped on.  Not that they ever did stamp on us.  Well, except for that time a herd of alosaurs ran wild one night and crushed those old folk in their beds.  Somewhere.  Not near here.  Somewhere Glen Applebee heard about, though. That was enough.  It had to stop.  I mean you can’t live like that.  Can’t make a living. So Glen Applebee and his men got to work and we have a better life all round.  It was funny how quiet it all became.  Without their singing.

And then there was the child.  I mean, I might not have bothered about the archeopteryx had it not been for that baby.  That shouldn’t happen.

It shouldn’t take Glen Applebee and his men long to clear the cliffs and when it’s done he’s promised he’ll build some fancy houses and apartments up there.  The sort that’ll raise the profile of the place.  Make us all feel proud.  Proud that somebody wants to come and live here at last without being disturbed by that constant, hideous noise.

It’s funny I do sometimes miss that high whinnying sound the big dinos made.  I always though it was a kind of singing.  Sweet and melodious.  I used to walk out into the forest and just sit and listen to that sound coming in on the evening air.   Now they’re all gone and i’ll never hear them again.

I wonder if I’ll ever miss the archeopteryx sound, that mournful wail that echoes round the cliffs every morning and evening with a sort of melancholy as if they were being nostalgic for all those millions of years that have passed by whilst they’ve been sitting there on all this prime real estate.  They were wailing for the lost youth of the species.  An old, old family who knows its time is over.

Anyway, I can hear the guns and it’ll be nice and quiet.  And then Glen Applebee says he’s got a plan to get rid of those ichtyosaurs and pleisiosaurs that roll quietly in the waves of the bay before they plunge down into that blue deep, unknown sea.  And those people in the cliff apartments will be able to swim undisturbed.