Cheeseheads and the Carcass of Martha
By ice rivers
Andy and his brother Pete heard the word through telegraph, a modern marvel in 1898.
The final flock of carrier pigeons, 250,000 of them were approaching.
Andy, who knew a lot more but said a lot less than younger brother Pete, had already witnessed and assisted in one major devastation. He had already spent an entire September day among the dead, they dying and the mangled; picking up perforated pigeons and heaping them into piles. Andy had watched eagles, hawks and vultures arrive to share in the spoil of pigeon piles. Only a comparative few of those scavengers were shot for their carrion on but the pigeon corpses were everywhere.
Andy gathered and stashed five lifetime's worth of pigeon feathers, bones and birdmeat and drove a horse drawn carriage full of dead passengers home to his hogs.
At one time, a single flock of passenger pigeons contained more than 2 billion birds. As the most common bird in America, many flocks and colonies existed. The passenger population appeared not only inexhaustible and invulnerable but also territorially threatening. One flocking colony known in Wisconsin as Endeavor, spread over 750 square miles.
Endeavor could and did obscure the sun.
People of Wisconsin, future Cheeseheads, were not about to surrender that much tundra neither frozen nor thawed. Andy and Pete were riflemen in the gaggle of hunter/soldier/patriots about to converge on that flocking colony from below.
As the targets approached, Andy could feel a surprising current of air. He heard a sound that reminded him of a tempest at sea. The passengers were overhead. The sky was dark. The brothers and the gang of hunters opened fire, reloaded and opened fire again and again and again and again.
The not clay pigeons dropped from the sky like bleeding, bleating hailstones. Children on the ground, fortified with poles and clubs were waiting. Andy was in such a frenzy that he didn't hear the cursing and thudding that surrounded him. Andy barely noticed the dozen passengers that fell on him while he was pulling and reloading. He didn't hear the thousands of gun reports coming from each side. Each unheard report bore mute witness to a load of scatter shot that could and did take down as many as ten passengers per blast.
A certain amount of time passed although the exact amount of minutes/hours is unclear.
Some have speculated that it took a bit longer than did the massacre at Little Big Horn with each blast the equivalent of ten arrows.
And then the flock passed.
And then there was silence.
Andy, with gun barrel still smoking, turned to Pete and said "that telegraph's a pretty damn good idea."
Ten thousand of a quarter million passengers flew away.
Twenty years later only ONE passenger pigeon, a bird named Martha, remained alive.
When Martha finally died, her body was suspended in a tank of water then freeze framed into a three hundred pound block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian Institute. Martha's carcass.
Martha's carcass is still around.
Andy and Pete are long gone now but their great, great grandsons hold season tickets on the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field. They wear cheeseheads and feathers as they back the Pack.
Right before the kickoff of the opening game at Lambeau Field, a tremendous roar emerges from the crowd. Dozens of people in the crowd, including all those related to Andy or Pete always turn to each other and remark that the roar sounds like "a thunderstorm of bloody passengers". Great, great, grandson Andrew didn't have a clue where that odd expression originated only that it had been in his family for more than a century.