Flamingo Wars:
I: Origins
II: L Elliott & Flamingos
»III: Dispute Intensifies
IV: Lawless Period
V: What's Next?
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"Mountains" Front Door
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Part III: The Dispute Intensifies
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The Flamingos Are Hunted. When Bowman and Sanders returned to their land one weekend, they noticed that three of the adult flamingos were missing. One hundred yards further on, they saw a wooden spit with a rubber chicken on it. Two other rubber chickens were strung, heads down, from a low tree branch. On the door of their shed was a notice from the "Inter-tribal Council", proclaiming the area to be an ancestral hunting ground protected by a late-1800s treaty with the US. According to the "Council", the Great Northern Whooping Flamingo was an integral part of an annual hunting/solstice ritual, and the treaty effectively superceded both federal and case law. (How a species that had evolved only the previous winter could be protected by a centuries-old treaty was left intentionally vague.)
Accident? Or Murder? About this time, someone (probably the Central City gambler) ran over one of the baby flamingos in his attempt to drive around Lake Elliott. A sign from the Flamingo Mothers Against Drunk Driving (or F****** MADD; you count the asterisks) was erected. Shortly afterward a shrine appeared to mark the scene. Nerves were getting frayed.
Lake Elliott Is "Reclaimed". During one of Dan's few absences from his shrinking domain, Bowman and Sanders drained and reclaimed the area. Bowman found a mysterious subterranean passage (whether a fracture in the rock, a small mineshaft, or an extraordinarily large and long rodent burrow is unclear), and drained the water, leaving a muddy surface. Sanders carted dozens of loads of rock from the excavation for Mule Deer Towers and resurfaced the road. A sign from the "York Gulch Historical Association" was erected describing this event and all previous skirmishes in the Flamingo Wars. Next »
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