Holy Gopher!

by Todd M.A. Wandio

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It was called Gopher Hill.

The townspeople called it that because of the seemingly endless stream of gophers being run over as vehicles reached the top of the rise. Nobody questioned it, it was more of a routine to try to avoid the little prairie rodents than it was a nuisance, but in swerving one inevitably put an end to two or three others. Gophers seemed to swarm the tires, to virtually dive for the spinning rubber discs which would squish them, maim them, roll them or otherwise end their rather short, seemingly pointless lives.

Nobody tried to do anything about Gopher Hill. It was enough for them that the gophers congregated there, rather than spreading themselves across the county. It made an interesting attraction to tourists, and colourful conversation at the supper tables throughout the town of Carbon Creek.

When the gophers began erecting the biggest gopher mound on record, nobody said much about that, either. Some of the farmers, particularly Earl Fleischeimer worried that the hill would destroy crops if allowed to continue to grow, but since Gopher Hill was situated on Crown Land, and therefore was not being used for crops, nobody cared enough to do anything about the ever growing earthen mound.

When Earl saw the mound from the outskirts of town, then he began to worry. His farm was right next to the government land upon which the mound was being erected. It had now become the highest single structure in Carbon Creek and area, that is, besides the silos. It was higher than a barn and growing. Wider than a farmyard, and getting wider.

Still, the cars and trucks made mayhem with the gophers on Gopher Hill, squishing, rolling, maiming and debilitating them as frequently as ever, perhaps moreso since the appearance of the gopher mound.

Did anyone in Carbon Creek notice that the gophers would stand upon their hind paws, holding what appeared to be measuring sticks, which they tossed to those waiting on the shoulder before being plowed over by farm trucks, beat up Chevy's and old rusted out Fargo's? If they did, nobody said.

Did anyone notice the disappearance of growth hormone from the supply shelves of the Carbon Creek Veterinary Clinic? Again, and because nobody took regular stock, such was not apparently the case.

Still the mound grew, and with it Earl Fleischeimer's discomfort. For he had to traverse Gopher Hill every day in order to get to and from Carbon Creek. He didn't care for the sound the gophers made as they met their end beneath the wheels of his tired old truck. It made his dog bark insanely, and made Earl wince with each squish and pop and rumble roll. Earl, finally, could take it no longer, and filed a complaint with the bylaw enforcement officer, Bucky Bradford, a university student home for the summer. While Bradford admitted that there was a bylaw in the books which allowed for controlled collection of gophers infesting an area, the bylaw also called for the complaint to be accompanied by signatures of "not less than ten others besides the complainant". In Carbon Creek, trying to get ten signatures on a complaint document was like trying to climb Everest with a pair of Vaseline gloves.

Earl gave up on the complaint, and aimed his beat up old pickup back towards home. Home and Gopher Hill, which loomed like a small mountain beside the road, nearly filling the section of Crown Land it occupied. His dog, Upchuck, so named following an incident involving a mouldy hunk of cheese, Edna Farber - the town animal hater - and a runaway cat, barked with a passion of which Earl had not previously known the dog capable, and continued to do so all the way up Gopher Hill. Once the squishing, rumble-wumping and crunching subsided, the usually lazy dog continued his hysterical foo-fer-all, his snout firmly aimed in the direction of the mammoth gopher mound at the side of the road.

Earl hazarded a look into the twilight illuminated mound, and found himself doing a double take. On the second look, he harumphed. Nothing more than dirt mounded to the sky like some prehistoric ziggurat, the gopher version of a Tower of Babel. Earl hoped like hell that the first look, which made him quickly take the second, was not what he thought, and was instead just the shadows playing tricks on an old farmer.

He could have sworn he saw a gopher head the size of a farm house popping out of the top of the gargantuan mound.

Now, it must be stated that Earl's opinion is not highly regarded in the town of Carbon Creek. There were a number of reasons for this, namely: his public drunkenness, and his lewd behaviour in the library where Miss Joanne Duff, alas, still a spinster all these years, the last of such in fact, since the marriage of her best friend Shirley McAlpine to Vinnie Rembaut, an event documented in the annals of the town as "A Most Remarkable Nuptial", worked the front counter and shelved, and, on more than one occasion was heard to sigh "Oh, my," and giggle like a schoolgirl, though the situation was really not all that funny. Besides that, Earl was a complainer, and, though this had never been proven, somewhat of an hallucinator, especially when he had been giving the bottle a bit of a tip.

Needless to say, Earl slept but fitfully that night, having seen, or not seen rather, the huge barn sized head of a gopher poking out of the world's largest gopher mound. He would not have given the vision any credence, he had had similar disarming sights appear, especially after a drink or a dozen. But the fact that Upchuck was so agitated, and this was not normal for the pathetic creature, gave credence to Earl's belief that he saw something.

And if it weren't a gargantuan gopher, then, by spanky, he would find out exactly what the thing living in the gopher mound was.

In town, people were beginning to talk. Word had it that Earl Fleischeimer had finally flipped, tipped the toddy one too many times, lost one too many bales from the flatbed, torn his stick shift into reality, gone nuts. He had bought up all the dynamite his credit card would handle, and with what remaining cash was in his savings account, purchased a spade, a pick-axe, a safety helmet with a light on it, a canary (he was really not with it. He had himself convinced that the mound was as deep as it was high and the air might be thin or poisonous down there; that if Hanta Virus was rampant in the gopher mound, the canary would alert him by dropping dead on the spot.) and a pump action shotgun. He said he was huntin' gophers which had infiltrated his property from "The Mound" on Gopher Hill. There was no law against shooting pests; he got his gun and four boxes of shells.

He plugged the shells into the slots on his canvas bandoleers, those shoulder straps full of bullets that Mexican banditos always wear in the movies. He looked like Rambo, trudging along towards his old truck, and Upchuck barked in panic until he realised it was Earl, then he wagged his tail and piddled on the seat.

Earl awaited nightfall, since the gophers were quite active by day, measuring tire sizes, measuring the girth of the cars, counting the volume of traffic from the safety of the roadside, leaping to their deaths a million million times in order to glean every iota of information from the deadly humans. Then they retired to their mound, really a full fledged gopher city by this time, as the sun set on the horizon, casting a red glow across Carbon Creek that Earl assumed spelled doom for his beloved town.

He may have been branded a fool, a jackass, a lunatic, a nutbar, a whacko, a freak by the people of that town, on that blood red evening, as he fixed his gear, and began tunnelling from the basement of his house towards the nearest nub of the gopher mound, pumped up on thick, syrupy coffee of which he had swallowed three pots. But in the morning, he would emerge a hero, and the deadly gophers and their heinous plot would be exposed. Earl smiled grimly and began to dig.

It was tough going, for though the top three feet of soil are wonderfully loamy black dirt, the kind for which the Canadian Prairies are famous, beneath that lay a thick, slimy, compact layer of clay, and Earl found the pick-axe of much more use than the shovel, as he chipped away at the silty cement, inch by gruelling inch, his farmer muscles receiving the workout of their life. By midnight, Earl had made good progress, for the coffee was keeping him working when it would have killed a normal man.

At 2:34 a.m., Earl's pick-axe struck pay-dirt, so to speak. He emerged from his own crude tunnel into one which was comparable to any transit tunnel in any city. It was twice as high as his head, a fact which made Earl unsling his shotgun and load as many shells as he could into the weapon. Keeping ears alert, his eyes darting wildly about, his finger poised on the trigger of his pump-action pal, and with Upchuck whining, wagging his tail and piddling at an alarmingly steady pace following behind, Earl Fleischeimer invaded the gopher's lair.

Meanwhile, topside, Eunice and Harold Brumpt, a couple from Manyberries up visiting for the weekend, were driving up gopher hill. Why at 2:34 a.m. they would be doing this, nobody could say, but it was convenient that they were, for just as they topped the ridge, a SCRUNCH was heard which resounded throughout the county, though nobody stirred from the safety of their beds, and most just kept on snoring through the night. No more Eunice and Harold.

Where Eunice and Harold's nice new Olds Ninety-Eight had been mere seconds before, only a small patch of oil remained, and a shadowy figure ambled towards Gopher Hill.

Similarly, Calvin Dawg, returning to his home down the road a spell from Earl's, was ambling along on his tipsy bicycle, had had a few too many at the tavern, and was sorely trying not to wobble into the ditch when and ear splitting SQUIRT was heard, and a single bicycle tire rolled tragi-comically into the very ditch it had been sorely trying to avoid.

Marty Claparchuk, Susan Red-Welt-Behind, and the guy everyone knew only as Jimmy were all similarly either rumble-rolled, popped, or maimed beyond recognition. In the stillness of the earliest of morning hours, on a night where not even the moon would dare show its bright halo of light, only the stars illuminated the killing field, where the sudden vision of a lumbering creature emanating from Gopher Mountain was shared with no one, for anyone who had seen it had by now met their maker, gone to their eternal reward, bought the farm, taken a dirt nap, pushed up a few daisies, slept with the fishes.

It was fortunate that Mike Bruga, a heavyset farmer with too much money and too few friends, who, to assuage his intense loneliness frequented the bar late at night and picked fights with people who had no business fighting in their stuperous condition, had the foresight to use the emergency band on his CB radio as he viewed the lumbering creature emerging from Gopher Mountain.

"Breaker......breaker.......we have an emergency.....repeat.......a definite S.O.S.....ah.......up here.........ah.......on.........ummm.........Gopher Mountain......over."

Sgt. Levesque, who, unfortunately had pulled the night shift because his sister Lunette was having a Tupperware party and wanted him to fly down for it, and he had to make up the hours he would miss by pulling a double shift two days in a row, intercepted the strange radio message. Grabbing the CB radio, he mumbled his reply.

"Ah.......Breaker........this is.......ah.........Sgt. Levesque ...ah ...stop ... ah........what........ummmmmm..........seems to be the.......ah......problem........over."

When Mike replied, it was a string of cuss words and garbled noises which reminded Levesque of the pick-up window at the Strathmore McDonald's, and he suddenly had a craving for a late night snack. Then the signal went dead, though the silence was preceded by screams, grunts and "aaargh's" the likes of which chilled Sgt. Levesque to the bone.

"Gopher Mountain?" he said to himself, scratching his head . He had been there dozens of times, sometimes just for the fun of it, to watch those comical gophers do their funny little dances beneath his car tires.

"Gopher Mountain?" he repeated, then flipped through his files until he came upon a report by Earl Fleischeimer, worried that the mound was presenting something of a concern to him.

Then reality sunk in. Levesque listened to the playback of the radio message, courtesy of Mike Bruga, since all incoming communications were tape recorded, and, by the time he was finished listening, had mobilized the entire police force, and instructed the town service workers to set up road blocks at the access to Gopher Mountain.

Whatever was going on, Levesque decided, it wasn't likely very healthy for the residents of Carbon Creek.

Earl had the wherewithal to stay in the shadows, once he was inside gopher territory. The first few canals were maintenance shafts, judging by their dishevelled appearance, and in them Earl was able to crawl along at quite a pace, the canary chirping happily in the cage which Earl had slung over his shoulder. The pickaxe and shovel he left where his excavation had ended and these much fancier gopher works began. At first, Earl forgot himself and the gravity of his mission, but when a huddle of gophers waddled by, chittering scientifically about the possibilities of near to light travel utilising a gopher sized particle accelerator, which to Earl sounded like "Chit Chitter Chit," just like all the other fascinating things the gophers said, Earl got serious in a hurry.

He had narrowly avoided that encounter by imagining himself part of the earthworks. It must have worked, and Earl soon had himself so convinced of his ability to transcend matter that he soon didn't even bother pressing himself against the walls. The weird thing was that the gophers still didn't notice him.

If Earl was even half as clever as a gopher, which he was not, he would have realised that the gophers were more than aware of his presence, but that they perceived him as little more threat than a common housefly is to a human.

"Those humans, they're everywhere," one gopher muttered to the other as Earl was standing stock still, trying like heck to become one with the earthen floor.

When the coast was again clear, Earl ventured deeper into the heart of the mound than any sane person had a right to. He would have been amazed at the complexity of the structure, if he weren't so scared that he was now just barely managing to concentrate all his efforts on 1) appearing invisible at times and 2) not wetting himself.

When he reached the cells in which were kept the captured humans, Earl choked back the bile which was rising in his throat. Fear is a nasty thing, after all.

"Don't worry," he comforted Mike, Marty, Jimmy, Susan, Calvin, Eunice and Harold, "I'll be back for youse."

They weren't impressed, and Earl wasn't known for his direction sense. He once got himself turned around plowing his own field, and it took him three days to find his way back home. Meanwhile the neighbors, worried that something untoward had occurred, had phoned the police, who had search parties combing all the ditches and waterways for his corpse. So no wonder these folks weren't too happy about Earl leaving them for coming back to.

Somewhere up ahead Earl could hear a pounding, a regular rhythm reverberating through these cleverly engineered channels through which he walked, sometimes attempting to appear invisible, sometimes just plain trying not to wet himself out of fear. What was worse, and what made the pant wetting dilemma more immediate than invisibility was the fact that the pounding only increased it's volume as Earl ventured closer into the labyrinth. He was getting near enough to hear the strange chittering of many gophers as they communicated, the thrum and click of many strange gopher machines coughing out data towards some unseen end. Finally, rounding one corner, Earl held his breath, willed his bladder to sleep and, opening his eyes just a slit so that they wouldn't reflect any light, willed himself to invisibility.

He was standing in what appeared to be Gopher Command Center. Though he was trying to be invisible and all, Earl's eyes opened to take in the magnitude of the place. Gophers scurried everywhere, chittering communications constantly, hopping over one another to get to their strange contraptions with the spinning discs, the blinking lights, the humming and thrumming and strange array of tubes squiggling to a central tank.

And in that central tank, Earl saw, for the first time, the confluence of the squiggling tubes. It was a sight to make him forget at least one of his two duties, a point which he hadn't noticed, since he was astounded beyond reasonable belief by what he saw. It was gigantic, as tall as a silo and a little rounder. Cute, yet at the same time fearsome in its monstrosity. A furry, cuddly to a giant run of the mill hundred foot tall gopher.

"Geez Louise," Earl murmured, loud enough that the gopher techs at the back row of machines turned in unison to stare at him momentarily before turning back to their duties. This convinced Earl that he had indeed become invisible, for he could speak, and the gophers apparently could not pinpoint the location of the speaker. This was all horse droppings, really. It's just that gophers are quite busy little fellows, and they didn't have the time to spare for another ridiculous human.

Suddenly, an alarm klaxon sounded throughout the facility, and Earl was shoved aside by a platoon of somewhat smaller gophers bearing sticks with hash marks on them. Yet another squad of the kamikaze gophers who did the measuring and evaluation of the vehicular traffic on the road. A gopher with a decidedly better coat chittered at the platoon, waving his little furry gopher arms around excitedly. Earl wanted to go over and hug him, he was so cute, but remembered that he was trying to remain invisible.

Then, from across the facility, a ruckus disturbed the gopher leader's speech, his disappointment echoed in the bristling of the fur on the back of his neck. When they dragged an R.C.M.P. patrol vehicle (the black speed trap truck that everyone in town thought was dirty pool, since it looked more or less like any other shiny new truck in town) with constable Portnoy strapped to the hood, Earl had a moment of clarity, and knew he had to act.

Throwing open his military style vest, he revealed a brace of dynamite strapped to his chest. He lit up a cigar and clenched it between his teeth, holding a stick of dynamite in one hand, his shotgun in the other, growling around the clenched cigar for attention.

The room fell silent except for the thumping, which was the gigantic gopher receiving its tube feeding, his/her little heart pumping blood like a powerhouse.

"Awright you stinking rodents, I've had it. First you muddy the roads with your stinkin' rodent corpses, then you build a nasty ugly mound right next to my field." At this point Earl paused for breath, partly because he was not a smoker and the fumes from the cigar were choking him. He stifled a cough and regained his composure.

"And now, now you create some kind of Ubergopher to deal out death and destruction to honest farmers. Well, I've had it. Prepare to meet your maker," Earl growled, though the gophers couldn't figure out what the heck he was saying, and were still conferring amongst themselves as to what exactly had just transpired as Earl lit the fuse on the stick of dynamite, and tossed it towards the monstrous gopher.

In an explosion which rocked the gopher growing facility, the Ubergopher exploded into pieces, and the ceiling began caving in.

In the fracas, Earl made it to Constable Portnoy, a kid just new to the service and scared as a rabbit, and freed him, half dragging him back to the tunnel from which Earl had come. Gophers made for his feet, but Earl kicked the furry soldiers aside and trudged on. It was only by sheer luck that he passed the holding cells and released the rest of the human prisoners.

By this point, the gophers were vacating the facility en mass, and to those few curious spectators topside, it appeared the gophers were running from a flood or fire.

When, ten minutes later, the freed humans emerged from Earl's house and reported to Sgt. Levesque, they thought the ordeal too incredulous to speak about, and had decided amongst themselves (and without Earl's knowing) not to say anything about the gopher organization nor the giant gopher either. They just explained that they had somehow fallen into a sink hole, and that by some miracle were saved.

That explained everything tidily, and while Earl was changing into some clean clothes, the story was already going around town how the rodents' burrowing had finally caused a sink hole to form, and that even the gopher tunnels had collapsed, sending the gophers fleeing to the four corners of Carbon Creek.

By the time Earl went out to meet his adoring public, they had all dispersed. It was dawn already and Earl was left facing an empty road, flanked by a sink hole the size of a farm yard, and fields of ripening wheat which stretched to the horizon, a sea of plenty shining golden in the morning sun. He shrugged, enjoyed the view one last time, and turned to go home. He was tired, and after saving the town, felt he enjoyed a stiff belt of the hard stuff.

Turning, Earl stopped short. The milling masses of a million homeless gophers greeted him, their hearts beating thwippity thwap, creating the aural illusion of a flock of hummingbirds lighting around him. Earl's eyes held a note of surprise, bewilderment, wonder, fascination and a dozen other emotions Earl couldn't even name, much less recognize, even if he had the time, which he didn't, for it was only a split second between his stopping short, his facial expression, and the somewhat ruffled looking gopher general muttering, "Let's get him, folks," and the angry mob which followed.

After all, you just don't mess with gophers.