A lot of people might think, we Caribou wouldn’t feel comfortable here in the city, but you’d be surprised. My little herd here has become quite urban, displaying both class and a modicum of fame. But we just don’t go anywhere, we are only drawn to High-Class Artsy areas; like here on Sherbrooke Street close to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
You’ll have to admit; our presence does improve the area. In fact, we are performing a community service by bringing up the neighborhood standards, by letting passersby admire our perfection, and by posing for photos with the tourists.
So, I don’t feel ashamed if some of my herd trades on their faded glory, and unabashedly mooches snacks from time to time. It’s understandable, given what we’ve been put though. It’s not as if we have a lot of financial resources to draw on. Keeping body and soul together has been difficult since the incident. But I don’t want to talk about it, its ancient history.
Some people might say we’ve let our standards drop since the pinnacle of our careers; but that’s what happens when you retire, or are forced to retire, your standards drop. I must admit we used to have a pretty impressive gig going. We would train all year long and then have only one night to perform … and we used to do it flawlessly. People depended on us and we came through big time.
But the reward for doing a good job; is more job. Soon the loads got bigger and bigger. We were managing of course, we had technical expertise and experience, but politically, we were just babes in the woods. We would never have dreamed in a thousand years that anyone would sabotage us and steal our gig. But that’s just what happened.
I’ll spare you the gory details but suffice it to say a herd of sneaky reindeer, tied the end of our sleigh to a tree with a long rope, then covered it with snow. Tried as we might, we couldn’t pull that sleigh when the boss gave us the command. I even got a hernia because of it. The boss was not pleased because he was under very tight time pressures.
That’s when those scabby reindeer stole our jobs. They sold the boss on, not only their superior strength, but also on the fact that they could fly! But the kicker was that they would always be able to find their way in the dark, since their lead reindeer had a searchlight nose.
The next thing you know our whole industry was disrupted; we were as useful as buggy whips… It could have been worse. Luckily, we were unionized and were able to retire down south here with a severance package and a small pension.