Fly, Crow, Fly!
Princess Jael was woken from her beauty sleep early in the morning by the harsh cawing of crows. She was, understandably, furious. She had been rudely awakened yesterday as well in the same way. This was intolerable. Something had to be done. Her bedroom in the new palace was just next to a cedar forest, and the crows roosted in it. Nasty, dirty, black crows that made a very unpleasant sound – and didn’t please the eye either.
Obviously they should all be shot, since they were literally blots dotting the landscape. Unfortunately, Jael recalled, there were these tiresome regulations, rules and conventions created in Geneva that protected all species, including, surprisingly (considering that they were hardly endangered!), crows. Faugh!
Jael was proud, determined, and intelligent. The conventions could not be disobeyed, but they could be evaded. She would have to think of something legal – but effective, nonetheless. She spent the morning just wandering around, but by afternoon, she was hard at work in her workshop. She had a plan.
The noisy crow was named Hassan. Hassan lived in the cedar forest, with his father Omar Sharif, and a pretty large crowd of uncles, aunts, cousins, and what-have-you. Omar told Hassan that their clan had lived in the forest from time immemorial. It was customary to greet the arrival of the sun in the morning by bending down one’s head and saying one’s prayers. Similarly, the departure of the sun at sunset had to be acknowledged with the same reverence. This was a sacred duty of all worshippers. This was the way it always had been, and the way it always would be.
Plan A: Jael got hold of a laser dazzler. Now, all laser dazzlers are set for eye-safe levels. But Jael was going to set the level a bit higher than that – after all, mistakes do happen! It worked in a way: Omar was blinded. It wasn’t very effective because Omar warned the other crows and they fled into the depths of the forest, where they were difficult to spot.
Omar told the clan that they would have to be very careful. This white witch that had recently made her palace next to their beautiful forest, who knew what she could or would do? It was war. But what could the helpless crows do? They had no arms. In another way, Jael’s retaliation had an unintended effect: Omar’s status was greatly enhanced: he was now a blind prophet. He sat perched in the middle of the forest ranting and raving, preaching hatred to any crow that would listen to him – and there were many.
A lot of them started a practise of dive ‘bombing’ the palace – but all that they succeeded in doing was making the palace rather dirty. Jael tried the laser blinder on these crows, but its effectiveness was much reduced since the element of surprise no longer existed.
Plan B: Jael decided to make a flying robot. Jael knew very well that making a flot that could match the flight of the crow would be very difficult-to-near-impossible. So she just aimed for speed. Her flot would fly faster than sound. What would that do? Create a sonic boom. A very loud boom. Rather disturbing, actually. It would be poetic justice. Whip the crows into shock, that was the idea. First Jael would make one flot, and then a whole fleet of flots could be made by her attendants, David and Benjamin.
Jael’s flots were very good indeed. The sonic booms generated by her flots really shook up the forest. The crows didn’t get a minute’s rest and they all became jittery and neurotic. There was talk of evacuation, migration, despair and defeat. Hassan decided to tackle the flots head-on. Literally. He got a sharp stick in his beak and then hit the flot with it. At high speeds, the collisions were hurtful to Hassan, but fatal for the flots. Soon the other crows picked up the trick, and reduced the fleet of flots to rubble. Jael made more flots, smarter flots, faster flots…there were as many crows killed as flots destroyed, but it was clear that this war could not be won: there were, alas, just too many crows.
Jael came up with the idea of psych warfare. The sound of frightened crows frightens crows. She recorded the alarm calls of the crows and played it back to them at very high volume, at night. This technique was also very effective, at least for a while. Gradually the crows became used to this too. In fact, the crows started making mocking versions of her tapes as a lullaby. Jael tried using ultrasonics, but the crows were unfazed – only Jael’s dogs became restless and barked all the time. She had to abandon this method.
Jael was, by this time, almost running out of ideas, and this was galling. She was thinking of defying conventions and either cutting or burning the forest down. Then she hit on the idea of genetic engineering. She wasn’t good at this but her Uncle Sam might be able to help. After all, Uncle Sam (and a few others) had Promised all of this Land to the Chosen (Jael’s) people – never mind the minor detail that her ancestors had left almost two millennia ago.
Finally, she came up with the idea of a Quickfix Tree. This genetically modified tree would be so sticky that the crows and their nests would stick to the sap and be unable to escape. Uncle Sam told Jael that this was an excellent idea but it would be easier to genetically modify the cedar trees. This way no new trees would have to be planted and the existing trees would become a death trap for the crows.
Jael was very hopeful. She sent Uncle Sam the cedar samples that he needed. Uncle Sam told her that it would take him at least a year to figure out how to modify the cedars, and the tree ‘therapy’ itself would be expensive, because each tree in the forest would have to be injected with the agent. Jael thought that this was sounding more like a Slowfix than a Quickfix, but she told Uncle Sam to go ahead anyway. Both Jael and Uncle Sam agreed that any problem had a technical solution: find the right force multipliers, and then, just do it!
Uncle Sam suggested to Jael that it would be more economical to modify only a part of the forest - not the whole damned thing. He told Jael that there was a river in the forest called the Litany River. If she modified the forest only as far as the Litany River, the sounds of the crows would cease to disturb her. The distance to the Litany, as the crow flies, was about 10 miles.
Jael and Uncle Sam unilaterally decided that this compromise plan was the best by far – since it respected the ‘rights’ of the crows and Jael’s undeniable needs, giving them both weightage. Uncle Sam says that all this Geneva stuff is old-fashioned and redundant in our times.Why did they not talk to Omar and Hassan? Talk? How do you talk to crows?
Hassan claimed that the crows had won the war (which was true, in a way, since they were many crows still alive). Jael said that she (and her friends, few but powerful) had won. This is how it stands today: a real win-win situation.
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