The Murder of Crows

Answering the call of the wild

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When it comes to the great outdoors, I’ve decided that my only weakness is I have no strengths. I don’t function well in the wild. My idea of camping is being as far away from the house as my longest extension cord will reach. I consider essential camping equipment to be a 24-inch flat screen and a carafe.

I’m an urban guy. Give me a week at a brownstone in Manhattan and I’m in heaven. Nothing relaxes me more than the sound of a distant siren in the night. I’d rather kill a bottle of Merlot than a deer. I think the smell of grass is highly overrated; warm hazelnuts on a street corner, now that’s worth a whiff. I like the feeling of concrete under my feet. I wore a life jacket at the “It’s A Small World” ride.

Look, I have good friends who hunt. They’ll wake up at 4 a.m. to go sit in a tree for five hours and wait for Bambi to stroll by and love every minute of it. One friend just got a cool new bow with a scope. I guess that evens the playing field a bit more, but I’m pretty sure Robin Hood would scoff at the contraption. Give Robin a scope and the Sheriff of Nottingham is toast.

If you take the whole killing-an-unarmed-creature aspect out of the equation, I get the allure. The thrill of the hunt, bonding with fellow hunters and shooting a cool gun all seem kind of fun. Responsible hunters eat what they kill. I do admire that. As non-hunters we are confronted with our hypocrisy. We have no problem buying a nice ribeye from the meat counter; we just don’t want to do the dirty work. Correct. I admit it. Guilty as charged. I don’t feel the need to raise chickens to eat an omelet or grow cotton to wear a flannel shirt. I’m a gatherer.

My brother-in-law John Cox has tried for 25 years to convert me to an outdoorsman. He has a 100-acre farm in east Tennessee. On one trip, he provided me with a shotgun. He may as well of handed me a loaf of pumpernickel for all the good it would do, but I gripped it like a man and gave him a confident nod.

My wife Berneice has three other brothers and along with one other guy (who just came along to see the goober Berneice married) they all joined in to round out the hunting party.

John thought I might enjoy hunting crow. As a former elected official, I had certainly eaten enough of it so the idea of killing a few had some appeal. We loaded our guns and headed out for our guy-a-thon.

We fought our way through the brush filled with what John calls “You ain’t goin no damn place” vines. Past the vines, we marched up a steep ridge and you could hear the crows off in the distance. It was pretty cool. Next we had to find the best spot to blend into the brush and trees near the top of the ridge. Like chess pieces we all crouched into our strategic positions.

I was really going to do it. I was going to aim a gun at something with the intent of hitting it. It made for entirely unexpected titillation. The liberal in me was wrestling with the pre-historic me like two emotional rats in a wool sweater. But there was no backing down. I was packing heat (which by the way was a lot heavier than I thought it would be).

The guys were all in camouflage gear, I was in a navy blue Kenneth Cole brushed leather windbreaker, but I pretended to blend in. Berneice’s brother Paul was in charge of the crow-caller thing. He would blow a perfect cadence and the crows would respond in kind. With each call, you could hear the crows getting closer. 

This was it. I was a hunter. My heart was beating through my chest. I finally was going to be a man’s man in front of the Cox boys. I was getting hand signals from John. I had no idea what they meant, but I nodded back in affirmation and gave a closed-fist double pump with a two-finger chaser. I think I may have told him in hand language that I had wet myself. 

I felt the cold steel of the trigger. I could see my breath in the December air. The crows were about to appear over the ridge. We were at the ready. I rested my cheek against the stock and peered into the blue sky waiting for the murder of crows.

It was just about that moment my cell phone rang. The sound of crows gave way to “The Way You Look Tonight” by Frank Sinatra. It was Berneice checking to see how the hunt was going. I would have needed a courtroom artist to capture the look on John’s face. His head was cocked instead of his gun. Paul was still blue from blowing the crow-caller and the guy who was just there to see Goober fell over laughing. Brother Bill suggested that in the future a crow call ringtone might be smarter. Ouch.

Mother Nature will just have to learn to tolerate my occasional visits. I’m a guy who prefers a skyline to a tree line, and I’m entirely comfortable having Ruth Chris kill my steak. I think there’s something inside all of us that yearns for the great outdoors. I’m pretty sure that’s why God created windows.

Gary Yordon is president of The Zachary Group in Tallahassee, hosts a political television show, The Usual Suspects and contributes columns to the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper.

He may be reached at gary@zprgroup.com.