Post 3: Maggie the Magpie

I must admit following my duck revelations I wasn’t feeling too happy about WILDLIFE and I suppose (in hindsight) for my next project I was looking in the wrong place to sway this dark new opinion. My initial euphoria surrounding my groundbreaking animal-piles discoveries had turned into a somewhat glum disconsolation and I spent around four days drinking myself into cold oblivion with a mind-altering concoction of Bacardi Breezers and Sugar Free Red Bull.

After a while I sobered up, smartened up and put on my best shoes and set out into the woods to track the Magpies.

I was to rue this decision.

For a long time Magpies have been one of Earths most renowned purveyors of piles, responsible for this pile, this pile and this pile here. I knew I wasn’t cracking a mystery here, and it came as no surprise that my Magpie of choice (Maggie: So named because of her time spent at the Magdalene college in Oxford) had some shiny trinkets in her pile.

She had clearly stolen these from naïve village folk and I could only imagine the ripple effect this must have had on previously idyllic rural societies:

 The Lady of the Manor loses her brooch and starts an outcry, she calls on the chief butler to find the culprit, and it only takes a matter of time before all fingers point towards Pip, the scruffy street-urchin stableboy with a big heart but grubby cheeks and a really annoying lisp.

Pip is soon ostracised and chased through the village by the MENSFOLK whose usual calm demeanour has been overtaken by an inexplicable bloodlust. All of Pips protests fall on deaf ears as the posse (armed with pitchforks and sporks) capture him and hang him from the sorry boughs of a great oak tree.

They beat him with sticks and acorns as if he were a ragged piñata and only as he draws his last breath do they hear a sound like laughter from above, and there they spot Maggie (the well-learned but morally void Magpie) Sqwarking with mirth as her piles of stolen jewels gleam and glitter beneath the Hunters Moon…

The blood of Pip remains on the hands of the MENSFOLK for all eternity, and what was once a proud and illustrious hamlet soon will crumble, wither and fade. Before long the crops have wilted and the once fine manor house has fallen into scabby disrepair, the local inn shuts its doors and the guilty MENSFOLK move away to the Cities, hoping that the noise and pollution of the big smoke will forever distance them from their guilty secret…

Most will be dead within a year. Suicide probably.

Do not look upon Maggie’s pile as a thing of beauty, for it represents all that is sick and wrong with the world, a smelted collusion of the evils intrinsic within both the world of MENSFOLK and the world of WILDLIFE.

WARNING

Please take this as a lesson and don’t leave your valuables on unguarded windowsills, Magpies only need a moment for you to turn your back….

Maggie the Magpie in a fine old Oak tree with her ill gotten gains. Yes that is a Christmas bauble there. Maggie stole Christmas.