river rat: Crow Clouds: A Halloween Tale Fall. Halloween. It is the time of year when the sun sets all too soon, missing out on the opportunity to accentuate some of the most vibrant colors nature has to offer. Just one more day of daylight until nine thirty would show off the magnificence that heralds the coming of winter.
Gone are the days of steamy summer sun heating the earth, creating waves of sultry, pollen filled air rife with the essence of reproductive spores of every stripe.
Gone are romps in knee deep water chasing crayfish and tossing sticks for dogs to fetch.
Now is a time for decay and moldering leaves. Musky cool air carries with it the raw smell of freshly turned earth even where the ground remains unbroken. Fall is upon the land in all its slowing grace as it readies the world around us for winter's biting wind and frozen waters.
Each fall, 'round about Halloween, when the first musky whiff of cool air stimulates my olfactory bulb, I remember a time in my childhood when the words of Edgar Allen Poe's, The Raven, first touched my soul.
I was 7 years old and had managed to hitch a ride with my father and my brother Curt out to the islands to check in on my oldest brothers, brother-in-law Chuck, and some of their friends as they hunted crows. If possible, we were going to "help" the men hunt crows and learn about the tradition of killing crows in the process.
Up until shortly after that fashion tragic decade of the seventies, crows appeared in abundance in our area twice a year. The migratory patterns of tens of thousands of crows brought them up and down our river valley each spring and fall.
On a brisk fall day, from the shoreline all the bare trees whose leaves had fallen weeks earlier appeared to have leafed back out in black feathery fullness. Crow upon crow crowded each and every limb to the extent that dead and cracked limbs would often break, causing an eruption of frantic black flapping wings until the displaced birds found new footing on which to perch.
At a distance the trees' black leaves rippled and undulated with the wind. Birds would take brief flight when mildly startled or when scuffling over positions prized for one reason or another. The micro bursts of black wings showed up as bulbous, jet black protuberances briefly apparent, only to smooth back into the uniform black cloak of feather-leaves.
Whenever anything, manmade or natural, would startle a flock nesting temporarily on an island, the entire canopy of blackness would erupt uniformly for a few seconds. The effect was uniform, resembling the spores of a dried, round mushroom ball kicked roughly across the forest floor. It was an explosion of blackness.
Distance blurred the lines of vision and imagination filled in the gaps as crows flew off in all directions at first. A slow motion explosion of nothingness radiating from the center of an island would coalesce into a flock acting of one mind.
Sometimes the flock would veer North or South and quickly light back on new perches. Other times the departing flock would land on an island that was already populated fully by other crows starting a brief ripple and explosion of similar blackness only to find the flock returning to their original roost. It was magical to watch.
There were enough of the black beaked creatures populating the islands to change the way the area smelled for a period of weeks. Guano from the crows decorated every surface in chalky white and purple stains smelling putrid and acidic. Pokeberry's, raspberries, cherries and all other reddish berries had to have been some of the crows' required daily dietary requirements. Otherwise, what awful chemistry in the crows' guts would create such malevolent looking droppings?
My brothers Dave and Bill were out to kill as many crows as they possibly could during crow hunting season. They weren't alone. Hundreds of hunters were on the islands and in neighboring fields determined to rid the earth of the scourge whose appetite blighted crops in our area and elsewhere. Those who killed crows had a mandate from the department of agriculture and their farmer neighbors.
Driving through the country side where cornfields stretched as far as the eye could see, large flocks of crows could be seen decimating acres at a time. Crows' appetites are endless and back in those days there seemed to be endless supplies of crows to blight the farms in our river valley.
Aside from being efficient food tubes processing grains, crows were aggressive, loud, and occasionally wary scavengers. Fortunately our area was not a nesting ground, just a point along the path between winter and summer digs.
My brothers and their pals were seasoned duck hunters, goose hunters, and ruffled grouse hunters. Each man had at least one shotgun, usually a 12 gauge, double barreled and illegally modified model, and each man carried hundreds of rounds of shells loaded with birdshot. A blast aimed into a flock of crows at the range of fifty feet or less could kill or wound as many as twenty crows per shot.
At twelve shots per gun, and assuming a low rate of ten fatalities per shot that's still easily over a hundred crows per man per session. These hunters were out for a greater average than that.
When dad dropped Curt and me off on the island the men were getting ready for the day's first round of killing. When I think back to the time it happened; our being on the island was as normal and natural as any other part of my childhood, or as any part of my friends' childhoods.
Placed in the context of today's child rearing precepts however, my first time hunting crows was horrific beyond measure.
Crows are easily spooked by the presence of moving animals or people. They will burst into flight at the slightest motion beneath them on the islands' surface. They spook each other even with picking and fighting over territory.
Even though they are quick to flight it seems their memories are very short lived regarding present dangers, perceived or actual. Once the motion stops, a flock of crows will land right back where seconds earlier they had been provoked towards flight.
That tendency for tenacity of place was likely bred into crows over centuries, allowing the crow to be a hardy scavenger undaunted by the trifling motions of non threatening mammals in the wild. Natural selection did not prepare the crow for human predators well in this regard.
Hunters had learned that crows will fill the trees above them if stealth can be employed after the initial set-up of the killing area. Duffle bags of loaded shells, gun cases, lunches, retrieving dog, and a huge camouflaged canopy had to be offloaded from johnboats and then set up at a point where the birds populated the trees densely.
Once the area was established and the dog (and in this case, also little brothers) were made to be quiet, the hunters waited in absolute silence. Whispered tones were the only spoken sounds.
I was very much into the stealthy aspect and being allowed to participate in this mysterious task. I squirmed and twitched waiting for something to happen, and was actually bored for the first five minutes.
In hunting crows, it helps attract crows if one can emulate the sound of a dying or injured crow with the help of a crow call. You see, crows are a civilized lot. When one of their fallen comrades is injured yet capable of putting out the distress signal, others come to his side.
I've never figured out what the other crows might actually do to aid a fallen compatriot. Is it possible they have crow medical backgrounds with which to mend a broken wing? Or do they simply provide solace and emotional support?
Chuck was fairly good with a crow call and thus began calling in crows to help the "injured" crow making the god awful noise.
I remember huddling down next to my brother Dave's dog, Jagger, as we all looked up to the tree branches above. In small groups of one or two dozen at a time, the crows would come flapping and cawing back to the island. Shortly after the first few dozen crows landed, Chuck was able to (thankfully!) quit with the false distress signal. After half an hour of silence, thousands of crows crowded on all available branches, darkening the sky.
I remember the way the light had shifted in the early afternoon from cloudless and clear to a gray tone of blue. The daylight was now filtering through ten thousand crows gathered on the canopy of tree branches. The way leaves had caused summer light to filter green tones of blue, the inky black, gun-oil blue feathers of the birds now filtered the light.
Grayscale island terrain with black coal sand and filtered fall light, combined with the constant caw of crows, created a world unlike any other I had experienced.
Crows pecked at one another, picking and cawing in unison. How did crows manage not to peck out each others' eyeballs when they crossed beaks so frequently and so abruptly? The click of beak on beak added a staccato beat to bleating caws and rustling feathers.
The sound and the smell overwhelmed me and excited me. I knew to be still and quiet but it was unbearable. I wanted to point and yell and laugh and throw sticks and do all the things a seven year old does. I held on as long as I needed to though, because I had been given clear instructions from the hunters and I had more than a little fear of the power of the weaponry to keep me in my place.
By contrast, Jagger, the full blooded black Labrador retriever, sat patiently with his eyes glued to my brother Dave.
Dave used Jagger to hunt ducks and had trained him from his first days as a feisty puppy to do nothing but retrieve whatever Dave told him to retrieve. Jagger was trained to within an inch of his life as to how best his master would have him behave. I don't recall Jagger ever making a mistake in what his expected behavior should be when my brother was around to control him. It was a tribute to the gentle nature of the breed that Jagger remained a loving pet despite the beatings Dave gave him while "training" him to obey.
Along with the big, black dog, Curt and I were told to remain crouched down low when the men with guns stood slowly up. We were also told to put our hands over our ears when we saw Dave raise his gun to the sky. We did exactly as we were told.
Jagger, Curt, and I were kneeling at the feet of the men as they stood slowly-silently stepping out from under the canopy of camouflage netting. Fluid movements-stealthy and deliberate-kept the crows from understanding the danger beneath them.
As Dave raised his gun our hands clapped to our ears and Jagger's tail wagged in the sand beneath him. The others raised their guns also, with each man covering a different, pre-determined portion of the sky above him.
The deafening roar of 6 guns firing all at once caught me off guard. I fell backwards off balance and landed in the soft sand on my back with my hands still clapped tightly over my ears.
The instant the first shots blasted into the limbs, the sky went dark. Crows took off frantically in all directions as large clusters of them fell to the ground and the next blasts ripped through the limbs and sky.
In the artificial darkness muzzle blasts from each gun flared out brilliant orange and blue-white. Each shot from each gun covered a slightly different margin of the quadrant assigned to each hunter. The muzzle flashes stabbed at the sky for the fifth time when the first crows started hitting the ground around us.
Settling on us was a fine mist of vaporized blood, flesh, and bone-and oh yes-those eyes that miraculously escaped destruction at the beaks of fellow crows-they were in the mist, too.
The dominance of the acidic guano smell that I had almost become used to was replaced with the pungently acrid smell of cordite, spent shell casings, and coppery crow blood. Feathers wet with blood spiraled like maple seed pods to the ground all around us.
With each shot came more and more crow bodies and body parts raining from above as the sky cleared and the sun crept back into the island floor. The crow cloud had lifted from the island to be replaced by the mayhem of falling limbs and all the horrible bits and pieces of crow that were carried aloft with blast after blast of bird shot.
I spent this first round of killing on my back staring straight into the offal that came from the sky. I dodged several complete carcasses but became covered with a fine sticky mist of crow stuff.
Stuff is the euphemism I used then and the euphemism I stick with to this day.
The silence that followed was deafening. It was a morgue still silence accompanied by slight ringing in the ears and faraway crow cawing from the still retreating flock, or what was left of it.
Jagger was the first of us to move. He didn't even have to be told to fetch. He simply got busy. He ran in every direction at first, going after the crows that he had seen falling last and obviously had been tracking with his retriever skills.
Curt and I were slower, more methodical retrievers who set to work also. Prior to the big kill we'd been briefed on our duties after the first volley was fired. While the men checked their weapons and reloaded them, we were to collect all the crows we could find and place them in piles.
"Don't try to put them all in one big pile." Dave instructed. "Make lots of smaller piles, 'cause you'll use them later on when we kill another batch."
We also had special instructions for the crows that were not quite dead yet.
"Stack all the living, wounded ones here." He said, pointing to a spot about fifteen feet from camouflaged area where we hid. "We'll use them later."
I was curious about that "we'll use them later" bit. Normally I would've asked a zillion questions right then and there, but I was too excited about picking up the crows and counting how many were dead.
It was a game, this dead crow collecting, and Curt and I were competitive little buggers from way, way back. We both kept a count aloud until someone shouted to count them in our heads. We gave up counting and just kept Curt piles and Nate piles of crows. At least our Dad had the good sense to drop us off with gloves!
Jagger had been amassing an impressive pile nearest to Dave while Curt and I had half a dozen piles each of fifty to a hundred per pile. The carnage was impressive. What an amazing amount of birds dead on the ground!
The "alive and still shrieking" pile was another thing all together.
The sound. Oh, the awful sound. The screeching, throaty caw of the dying crows made Chuck's attempt at creating that sound seem mellifluous and enchanting. The real death rattles of the injured crows creeped me out. What on earth could be in store for these crows that we wouldn't simply put them out of their misery? What was it that they were "saying" with each raspy caw?
As we rounded up the last corpses and the last injured crows the men were done with their smoke breaks and had fully re-loaded their shotguns. I didn't see how another kill was going to happen, because all the activity had driven the crows from this island and from neighboring islands as well. What was left to kill?
Chuck was the first one to make it to the dying crow pile we had amassed. He casually sauntered through the sand to what was easily the largest and most animated pile we'd gathered. With his big, meaty hand he reached down, or rather over as the pile was more than waist high, and grabbed a twitching, crying crow.
He expertly lofted the crow up into a densely limbed tree, lodging it in the crotch of two large limbs. The cawing increased in volume from this first decoy. Now I understood.
Soon Bill and Dave and the others were pitching the screaming injured high into the trees, trying to lodge them where their screams would be most efficiently used to attract more crows-to kill.
What were they screaming, these injured crows?
"Somebody help me...I'm hit!"
"Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker! Damn redneck motherfucker! You blew my wing right the fuck off. Damnit!"
"Someone, please kill me. Please!"
Whatever it was that the crows responded to, the calls from injured crows lofted into crooks of limbs and crotches of trees brought in their sympathetic brethren in droves. Soon the trees were heavily loaded down with black, flapping, cawing crows gathered around the dying decoys.
Below the blanket of rolling, black feathers lurked the killing machine that was made up of six armed men, two boys, and a Labrador retriever. Soon the muzzle flash would spark again...and later again...and again.
Until darkness the cycle repeated itself over and over with more stacks of dead and dying crows populating the island's surface. Holes were dug, crows were tossed into the holes, duffle bags packed, boats loaded, and hunters, children and dog were ferried back to shore.
In the ensuing years, hunting of crows depleted their numbers radically. The islands don't fill with crows twice a year as they once did. The skies don't blacken with clouds of black, cawing scavengers.
The child that stacked the dead and dying has grown to appreciate the beauty of nature's own balance and vows, regarding hunting crows, nevermore.
