I did a double take while driving a highway near my home in Canada the other day. At first, I thought my eyes deceived me but they didn’t.
I thought I was looking at a yellow Caution Deer Crossing sign with an image of a deer, but instead there was an image of a kangaroo. The sign was professionally done so I’m wondering if someone had visited Australia lately and brought back this unique souvenir which they thought they’d have a little fun with.
There are a lot of exotic farm animals being raised in our area these days from buffalo to llama, to elk and ostrich. But as far as I know, no kangaroos.
This reminded me of a true story from years ago when I worked on our local daily newspaper. A farmer plowing in a field near the village of Rostock in Southern Ontario, not far from my home, overturned a large bone. Authorities got involved, called the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and sure enough, the farmer had uncovered a wooly mammoth, an animal that died out in these parts 12,000 years ago.
So, we did big stories on it, of course, but then something else happened which caused a few more stories.
Someone (identity still unknown) erected a great yellow caution sign along a highway near the extinct animal find warning drivers that this particular spot was a “Mammoth Crossing”. Soon, another sign went up further on down the road, pointing in a farmer’s lane to the Mammoth Conservation Area.
I went in one day and interviewed the farmer in his kitchen. At the end of his lane was a woods and very wet marsh. Every once in a while, he said, he’d see an unfamiliar car go speeding by the window, another wooly mammoth enthusiast, off to the conservation area to see the big beast, seemingly unaware they were 12,000 years too late.
The farmer and his son took turns getting the tractor and pulling the wayward cars out of the swamp.
For some reason, I am fascinated by the wooly mammoth, and am pretty sure they once roamed across the property my family and I live on today. They also were plentiful out in the Rostock area apparently, and people alive when the woolies were lumbering around in elephant-like fashion would chase them into the Ellice swamp (still in existence today) where they would sink and drown. The natives would leave them down there because the cold swamp acted like a refrigerator.
Every once in a while, they’d wade down into the swamp, hack off a large chunk of the beast and bring it up to roast over a roaring fire for supper.
How would that compare to dropping into the local grocery store for a few chops for the barbie, mate?
©2011 Jim Hagarty
