Taterskin & The Eco Defenders: Book 2, Chapter 21
Book 2 ("Tell It to Future Generations"), Chapter 21 of 56
CHAPTER 21
It turned out that They Are Afraid of Her had another name, a nickname of sorts, that she went by. We were relieved by that, because if we were to ever address her, we would have otherwise either had to get her attention by saying, ‘Hey, you!’ or forget what we were going to tell or ask her by the time we got her full name out.
Her nickname is Chapawee. We never called her by her full name after finding that out; We always called her Chapawee, which is an Oglala Sioux word that means ‘Industrious.’ And that she was. And is.
The reason why it even mattered much what we called her was that she asked to come with us. Once she heard about our past exploits, and our future plans, Chapawee told us that there was nothing she would rather do than fight injustice as we do, and there was nothing she would prefer to be than an Eco Defender.
So, we had to rearrange the seating order in our JNGs again. When we left for our next stop (Hartford, Connecticut in 1903), Chapawee took the co-pilot’s seat, and Alexis moved back to the console between Albert and her so that the Zephyr’s seating chart was now:
...and that of the Androcles was:
You may have noticed that Ravelle became the pilot of the Androcles from this leg of the journey onward. Albert had given him some lessons and instructions. Also, because the JNGs practically fly themselves if you let them, Ravelle didn’t need to log a lot of hours of flight time before he was ‘good to go.’
Chapawee was given a Doolittle so that she could converse with all of us animals, but it was almost as if she didn’t need one. She seemed to be in tune with how we were feeling without needing to hear the words expressed.
Our newest member could hardly believe it when Albert explained to her what vivisection was. Chapawee was full of righteous indignation and was champing at the bit to help us save ‘the Cat people’ and ‘the Dog people’ and ‘the Monkey people,’ as she referred to them/us.
It was true, Chapawee had never seen or heard of Monkeys before, but we told her they were kind of like miniature versions of Ooga. Her response was that they must be extremely tiny versions of Ooga if mere humans were able to take them captive.
The trip from Wounded Knee to Hartford took us about an hour and a half. We crossed the Mississippi where South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa meet, then passed over cornfield after cornfield filled with crows in Iowa.
The noteworthy sights after that were the lower parts of Lake Michigan and Lake Erie. As we passed over Elmira, New York, Albert mentioned that Mark Twain, the writer of A Dog’s Tale (and A Horse’s Tale), penned much of his work there. Reading the former story is what brought the evils of vivisection to Albert’s attention.
Speaking of that author, when we arrived in Hartford on what was a moonless October night, we stashed the Zephyr and the Androcles behind some hay bales in the carriage house at his former residence on Farmington Avenue.
We slept the sleep of the righteous that night. That is, we felt good about what we had accomplished in South Dakota, and looked forward to what we were about to do in Hartford, too.
The next morning, we awoke refreshed and “rarin’ to go,” or “roarin’ to go,” as Stripes and Rory put it. After a quick breakfast of what we could find in the carriage house and what Albert purchased from a nearby deli, we sat around on the hay bales discussing our precise plan of action.
“There is a laboratory near here that carries out experiments on Dogs and Cats, both young and old — by young, I mean Puppies and Kittens,” Albert said. “Also Mice and Rats and such.”
“They perform the most invasive of surgeries, not because the animals need them to be healed of a malady, but out of curiosity as to how the animals will respond to these experiments. They do not even sedate or anesthetize the animals. The human experimenters feel that either anesthetizing the Animals would be a waste of time and money and do no good — as Animals supposedly feel no pain anyway — or that sedating them would interfere with the usefulness of the experiments.”
“What do you mean, exactly, Albert? They torture these animals?” Ravelle asks.
“Yes, that’s pretty much it.”
“And I thought we had it bad as slaves in the South.”
“You did. You did have it bad,” Albert said. “As to torture: Vivisection is torture, there’s no doubt about that. The doctors perform these operations, not to punish or coerce a confession out of a murderous beast, but simply from egotistical scientific curiosity.”
“That is even worse than they treated us,” Chapawee said, with a sangry (sad and angry) expression on her face. “How are we going to stop them?”
“The same way we stopped those abusing you at Wounded Knee,” Albert said.
“Surround the Animals to protect them?” Drako asked.
“Sort of; but with a twist,” Albert somewhat mysteriously answered. “We will swarm the laboratory with Animals, to the point where the vivisectors can’t even get into the place without the Cats using them as scratching posts and the Dogs utilizing them as fire hydrants.”
“Fire hydrants?” Terri asked.
“All right, a tree then.”
“Then what? What do we do then?”
“You mean after recruiting the Cats, Dogs, Squirrels, Raccoons, Opossums, and whoever else wants to join us? We wait outside for the mad scientists, or evil geniuses, or whatever they are. For they will assuredly vacate the premises in something of a hurry once they become the ones being used for purposes which they find disagreeable.”
“I have an idea,” Alexis said. “How about we offer ourselves up as specimens for them to experiment on.”
“What?!? Have you gone batty, Alexis?” Yukyuk asked.
“It would seem so,” I said, “But I’m sure she’s got a trick up her sleeve ... or, up her down feathers, that is.”
“So explain yourself, Alexis — what’s the big idea?” Ooga prodded. “Do you want us to be probed and poked and scalped and eviscerated” —
“No, of course not, my friend. This is the deal we offer them: They can perform their experiments on the CM” —
“Who are the CM again?” Jowls asked.
“The so-called ‘Charismatic Megafauna.’ Meaning, in our case, the Elephants, the Rhino, the Hippo (you, in other words, Jowls), the Lion, the Tiger, and the Cheetah.”
“Thunder and Lightning! If one of those sawbones pokes me, I’ll give him some stripes of his own,” Stripes said.
“Exactly my point, my sleek and powerful friend,” said Alexis. “I want to basically say to them, ‘If you want to abuse one of us animals, why don’t you pick on someone your own size, and see how it goes?’”
“Own size? Stripes is bigger than any of them,” Rory said, “And so am I.”
“Yes, but not as big as all of them put together. Besides, they abuse animals who are way smaller and much weaker than they are, so I’d say it’s only fair to demonstrate to them what that feels like,” Alexis responded.
“There’s another option we could give them,” Ravelle said, having just then thought of it. “We tell them that they can experiment on us if one of us can perform the exact same operation on them first.”
Yukyuk chuckled at that. Her mirth was contagious. The scientists would not trust a Lion or Tiger to keep their claws retracted, or a Rhino to keep from horning in on their business, or a Hippo from knocking them galley-west, or the Elephants from slapping the snot out of them with their trunks, puncturing them a little with their tusks, and squashing them a bit with their feet.
“There’s one thing we are forgetting,” Chapawee said. “Our solution will shut down the vivisection lab here in Hartford, but what about all the others around the country?”
“We will make sure this thing is publicized,” Albert said. “Don’t worry, the whole country will know about it, and about us. The whole world will be put on notice: You experiment on us, and you will live to regret it.”
“Or die to regret it,” said Chapawee.
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