A strange bird, but we’ll always remember how Lucy gave us wings for just awhile

SLIGHTLY SKEWED (COLUMN) — News item: Lucy the runaway emu was taken into custody in Nanaimo.

Awakening in what was supposed to be an empty house, I heard voices.

“Dibs on the drumstick.”

“Very funny. Pass me the grapes.”

“Get your own grapes. You’re the one with the talons.”

They were in the darkened kitchen, two bent figures peering into the refrigerator, dimly illuminated by the light spilling from its open door. Their backs were to me, but I recognized one from his twitching white tail.

“Hello, Buck,” I said. “Who’s your friend?”

“Lucy the Emu,” the deer replied.

That stopped me. I tried to look nonchalant, but it’s not often you find a real live celebrity grazing in your crisper.

Lucy, as you must know by now, was Vancouver Island’s most famous fugitive since Ian Thow. He — yes, Lucy is a boy — took on folk hero status after making a break from his Nanaimo-area home, a man-sized flightless bird who took flight nonetheless. The authorities tried to corral him, but for five days the only thing captured was the public’s imagination, Lucy’s whereabouts the greatest mystery this side of Malaysia.

“Pleased to meet you,” Lucy said, bobbing a beak on which, incongruously, a pair of sunglasses teetered.

I paused, peered closer. “Are those my prescription sunglasses?”

“Prescription?” Lucy said. “Thank God. I thought the grapes had fermented.”

Buck interjected: “He needs them as a disguise. We’re going on the lam. That’s why we’re raiding your fridge.”

As I have mentioned before, deer have a relaxed attitude to personal property. Apparently emus do, too. I decided to ignore this. “What are you running from?”

“The government,” Buck replied. “The Man is after the animals, wants to gun us down. First it was the UVic bunnycide, then urban deer, now it’s the wild pigs.”

That last bit is true. The province announced that B.C. hunters may kill feral pigs “anywhere and at any time.” The pigs, descended from escaped farm animals, have been declared an invasive species.

Lucy shrugged. “Maybe that’s why Buck’s running. Me, I don’t need a reason. This bird may not fly, but I can still hit 60 klicks an hour on the straightaway. Springsteen, baby. Born to run.”

Whatever drove Lucy’s adventure, people were captivated by it. Somebody set up a @Lucyontheloose Twitter account. Someone else plotted Lucy sightings on an online map.

The story hit the national news in print and on television. The week saw Crimea in crisis, Stephen Harper in a tug of war with the Supreme Court and everyone from Alberta’s Alison Redford to the leadership of the Portland Hotel Society accused of slurping from the taxpayers’ trough, yet all the buzz was about a giant, cartoonish Australian chicken.

We have always had a fascination with fugitives: Robin Hood, Bonnie and Clyde, Edward Snowden, Waldo. Sometimes, as with Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, we can’t wait for them to get Whac-A-Moled, but on others we cheer for them on. Freedom, even from the most comfortable of prisons, is a powerful magnet for both man and beast, one to which we can all relate. (Back in 1999, after a Vancouver Island marmot escaped from the Calgary Zoo, the Times Colonist’s Les Leyne wrote a brilliant piece in which he envisioned the little fellow holed up in a fleabag motel, drinking rye, smoking and plotting his return to B.C., the lure of home outweighing the low-tax, high-employment Alberta Advantage and the non-stop sex of a captive breeding program.)

The emutable truth is we all harbour a little Lucy in our hearts. As safe and secure as it may be, some days life feels like a velvet coffin. Some days, you just want to get in the car and drive.

When Lucy went on the loose, we lived through him vicariously — and had to pick sides.

“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends,” Martin Luther King Jr. once said. I thought about that, tossed Lucy my keys: “Take my car.”

“Really?”

I thrust my fist in the air. “Freedom! Braveheart! Thelma and Louise!”

Alas, late Friday the emu’s goose was cooked. Lucy was nabbed in Nanaimo.

He is safer now, but I am sad.

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