July 13, 2020

Carl the Coyote

This is Carl.

Carl the Coyote.

Carl the Coyote is a rubber decoy my brother asked me to order from Amazon.

Because of the geese.

And their shit.

My brother was tired of stepping on and cleaning geese shit on the dock. He was tired of people walking into the house with goose-shit-laden shoes. He was tired of constantly asking everyone if they were wearing their inside shoes.

He was tired of the geese.

The geese were his great white whale.

Carl was now his third attempt to thwart the geese and their respective shit. The first had been putting up a wire fence around the perimeter. He had sent me to Home Depot to buy the fence. He had spent time sitting on the deck observing their formation and taking notes on the trajectory path of their advance team. He had identified and pinpointed the area of entry on the beachfront.

Normandy in Muskoka.

I should probably mention at this point that should you encounter my brother and he should then launch into a long diatribe about geese and his ongoing battles with them, then it is probably not a good idea to say, “It’s only shit.” He doesn’t take kindly to that.

We put up the fence and in the morning woke to find a blanket of geese feces on the lawn and on the dock. Perhaps they, too, had gone to Home Depot and acquired wire cutters or perhaps their engineering corps had constructed a makeshift bridge. Or perhaps, as I have previously suggested, it was as simple as the notion that geese could fly.

Nevertheless, it was clear the fence did not work and it was time to go to Plan B.

Plan B was a motion-detector sprinkler system which generated a spray of cold water. I have to be honest, I was very skeptical at first. It sounded a little too good to be true. But it turned out the sprinkler system was something of an engineering and mechanical marvel: any time any member of the Zevy family walked within 20 yards of the sprinkler, we would get sprayed. The geese however, got away scot-free.

“Can you please turn off the fucking sprinkler” soon replaced “are those your indoor shoes” as the most used phrase in our family.

Then my sister-in-law made the mistake of saying, “It’s only shit.” Dinner that night was very, very quiet.

My brother, his head buried in the virtual cloud, was undeterred.

“They may have won the battle, but they will not win the war,” he declared.

He scoured the cottage owner message boards. One thing kept coming up over and over: coyotes.

And so we bought Carl.

My brother and the geese signed an armistice at dawn. It was a very moving ceremony.

For seven days, we encountered neither geese nor their shit.

Hail to Carl.

With my brother now in a perfectly jovial mood, I thought it might be a good time to ask if I could invite a guest to the cottage.

Amelia Reynolds.

Now ordinarily I don’t need permission to invite a guest to the cottage, because I have my own little bunkie on the property and my family are only too happy to see what kind of deranged woman would agree to spend a weekend in that tiny bunkie. The problem however was this woman and I had not reached the point in our nascent relationship where sleeping anywhere near me nor my bunkie was a possibility. In fact, inviting her to the cottage, to swim in the refreshing lake waters while the city experienced a record heat wave, was my attempt to change the parameters of the aforementioned fledgling relationship.

So I needed them to agree to let her stay in the main cottage.

Amelia Reynolds was dying to come to the cottage.

Now neither Amelia Reynolds nor I was crass enough, well Amelia Reynolds certainly wasn’t, to suggest or admit that a weekend at the cottage meant a symbolic fast-forward button had been pressed, but, at the very least, it would be a sign of progress.

My brother agreed at once and my sister-in-law, now virtually ebullient about not getting sprayed by the sprinkler every time she went to the dock and now able to wear her outside shoes wherever the fuck she wanted, also was on board.

“I think it is a little weird,” she said. “But she is welcome to stay in the Moose Room.”

Three times on the drive up, Amelia Reynolds asked if there would be a bonfire and if we could make s’mores. I assured her there was and we could. I even sent my brother to the grocery store to get extra graham crackers and marshmallows.

Dinner was fantastic. My brother and sister-in-law put on a great spread. Rib eye, salad, baked potato. My brother even made his famous beefsteak tomato and parmesan cheese appetizer. The wine was flowing and my nieces were charming and doting. Not once did anyone throw me under the bus.

We decided to eat the key lime pie along with s’mores at the dock. My brother and nieces went down first in order to build the bonfire while Amelia Reynolds and I cleaned up and loaded the dishwasher.

Not once did my sister-in-law say, although she was surely thinking it, that this was the first time I loaded the dishwasher all summer.

The night was going perfectly. It was magical.

“Let’s go down,” I said. But Amelia Reynolds said she wanted to take a quick shower and change into her sweats. She said she would be super fast. That I would be very impressed. Then Amelia Reynolds kissed me.

Amelia Reynolds was true to her word. Her shower was super fast. It was already dark, but my family had built a huge bonfire and it was casting a pretty strong light. It wasn’t that far from the cottage to the dock.

We had had Carl for only a week. During that time, I had been startled twice and my sister-in-law and each of my nieces once. And we knew he was there.

Carl was a rubber decoy, but he was pretty convincing.

Amelia Reynolds did not know about Carl.

That was my bad. That’s on me.

It was hard to believe anyone could scream that loudly.

Amelia Reynolds screamed very, very loudly.

For a very long time.

We finally calmed her down and showed her that Carl wasn’t real.

Amelia Reynolds was now in a state. She thought it was a prank. She thought we had set her up with a practical joke. It wasn’t clear if she was angry, horrified, or just plain embarrassed. Either way, she said she wanted to go home.

My brother, my sister-in-law, and nieces all tried to explain about the geese. About the shit. But Amelia Reynolds would not be placated. She went to the Moose Room, packed her bags and got into my car. I begged her to stay. “At least wait until morning,” I said. But Amelia Reynolds said she didn’t want to spend another minute at the cottage.

So I drove her home.

She calmed down on the drive home and I thought we had smoothed things over. But I never saw Amelia Reynolds again.

My brother texted me a picture the next morning. Actually, he sent it to the family group chat. Here is the picture. With it he included a caption.

‘Carl having tea with the geese.’

Yup. If you look closely, you can see Carl surrounded by a flock of geese.

Then Danna texted what everyone else was thinking.

‘I guess Carl only works on Uncle Ronnie’s dates. 😀’

The end.