Ludicrous Lore
They say the perpetrators all got off scot-free
by posing as indigenous, but how could that be?
They made a ludicrous trio, emerging from their car.
All wrapped-up like packages, they couldn’t wander far.
They’d been here stealing chickens from White Cloud’s poultry farm
on the reservation, but what could be the harm?
He had so many chickens that he’d never miss the one
or two or three or four or five that they had pinched for fun.
Yet with feathers in their hat bands and blankets held around them,
instead they uttered this excuse when the rangers found them.
They’d done a bit of hunting here on tribal land.
Their leader was Geronimo. He and his loyal band
had shot the deer with arrows, then bound it to their roof
with ropes tied ’round its antlers and then around one hoof.
But driving down the winding road, the driver got too dizzy.
(They said that it was vertigo that put him in a tizzy.)
That’s what caused the accident that spilled them off the road
where they toppled over sideways and lost their struggling load.
The deer ran off into the woods. It seems it wasn’t dead,
but merely stunned when arrows hit it on the head.
(Luckily, the bottle from which they’d all been drinking
had fallen in the water where the car was quickly sinking.)
It’s surprising that the rangers believed their tawdry tale,
and so they didn’t haul these buffoons off to jail.
They simply called a tow truck, which to their consternation
towed the whole bunch down the road to the reservation
where, alas, they found no kin but only laughter met them
as they huddled near the car and phoned for friends to get them.
And after they departed—hungover, sodden, sore,
their whole silly debacle passed into tribal lore.
The time those drunken cowboys with nothing else to do
sneaked onto the tribal lands and tried to pass for Sioux.
Their totaled car they left behind, and here the whole plot thickens.
It now serves as a handy coop for all the tribal chickens.
Today”s prompt words are scot-free, vertigo, indigenous and package. Image by Tyler Mulligan on Unsplash.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 
Oh Wow written by someone who must know from real life, and brings back one of many such encounters in my work life as well – Thanks for the memories~!!!
This happened on a very hot Saturday in four corners of New Mexico just North of Farmington on a Navajo reservation. There were times when I had to do things to keep our field crew working, So I picked up a worker, my brunton compass a survey chain, and a lot of brightly colored plastic flagging in a back pack. My task was to lay out a survey line so the crew would have work to do on Monday.
This was a chore requiring several miles of rough walking, measuring, and laying out a straight survey line. So later in the day we got to the end of our project and turned around retracing our steps back to my vehicle. We had gone only a short distance when we came upon a wagon pulled by an old horse, with several native Americans in it. In their wagon also was full of every flag we had spent the day laying out~! As they passed each flag they would just reach down, and pull it up throwing it into the wagon. They liked the bright colors and their wagon was full of it. This is not the only time it was made clear to me that anything on a reservation actually belongs to the Natives, not us~!
So I made a deal with them, I gave them several full rolls of flagging and told them to keep what they already had, but please leave the rest until our workers had come by on Monday, after which they could have that too~! We then retraced our steps redoing what we had done the whole day. This was only one such instance, it was theirs and we had to abide by their rules~!
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What a great story. You must blog it…My story is fiction but yours has the ring of authenticity.
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I answered your question in the blog below. Many people think that I am an evil person due to my wanting answers. If I read something that does no quiet sound right I research it or it bothers me… The bible is bad about things that may have been true to the people in the year 600 but not so today…..https://mcouvillion.wpcomstaging.com/2021/09/02/i-can-not-leave-this-alone/
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Yikes! That was a crazy misadventure. I love how you make stories into great poetry. Well done.
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That’s a fine piece of bush poetry, Judy. Humour, drama and chickens can’t be outdone. 😉
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Ha. The great triumvirate of poetry!!!
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