by Kelly Reeves
It was the summer before the 6th grade, 1980 or ‘81, I guess. I spent much of the summer with my maternal grandmother, Alma McKay. We called her Nanny. Many of you knew her, and some of you knew her as well as I did. Heck, I spent much of the other three seasons with her, too. At her place, outside is where we kids spent our time. There were plenty of woods and creek bottoms to explore and small game was abundant. Rabbits, squirrels, quail, woodcock, coons, possums, pole cats, you name it, it was there.
The previous school-year, I made friends with a city boy, Chris, at school. Chris loved to go with me to Nanny’s house and he was always ready for an adventure. One summer weekend, Chris’ dad brought him to Nanny’s house and dropped him off with his new 20-gauge H&R shotgun. I had my own single-barrel .410. Chris had several critter calling cassette tapes from Johnny Stewart and a battery operated cassette player. Friday night we planned the next day’s adventure. We were going to play the cassette of crows fighting a hawk, and planned to massacre as many crows as we could.
Saturday morning rolled around and we told Nanny our plans. Her response was, “Whatever you boys kill, you are going to eat for supper.” Let me back up a little. Nanny was a wonderful woman who had lived a tough life. She was a big-boned woman and she was a firm believer in “spare the rod and spoil the child.” That meant any child. She did her part to train the next generation in how to act, and how not to.
Saturday morning came. Chris and I gathered our gear and headed for woods. We set up at the edge of a pine thicket. We put out two pairs of decoys (black tube socks), one pair on the ground and the other draped over some pine limbs, We hid the cassette player under a thriving stand of goat weed, pushed ‘play’, and ran for our stands. “CAW, CAW, CAW” went the tape. The calls grew in numbers and in volume. In just a few seconds, we saw the first crow circling above us but way out of range. The crow made a few circles and flew away. It wasn’t long until a whole platoon of crows arrived. They circled and swooped at the socks, err… decoys. They joined in with the sounds of the tape. They dipped and dove, and we loaded and shot as fast as we could. We shot a box of shells each and when the pine needles, gun smoke and feathers cleared, we had four crows on the ground. We had no idea who shot what so we argued about who shot the most birds all the way back. I still believe I shot at least three of the four. Chris still says he shot all four.
Excited at our success, we ran home to tell Nanny. She asked, “Where are they?” “We left ‘em in the pasture”, I replied. Nanny, in no uncertain terms, told us to go get the crows and bring them to her, which we woefully did. She instructed us to pluck the crows and bring them in the kitchen to her. If you’ve never plucked and picked a crow, I’ll just tell you, they are much better looking in feathers. They look pretty pitiful when naked.
Nanny took the birds into the kitchen. Pots and pans banged and clanged, dishes rattled, and the aroma of baked crow began to drift throughout the house. She made a crow pot pie that looked quite beautiful, but the smell would gag a buzzard. Chris said to me in a whisper, “There’s no way I can eat that.” I explained that he really had no choice; eat the pie, or get a whippin’ and then eat the pie. We ate the crow pie. It tasted as bad as it smelled, but we got it down and went outside as quickly as possible.
Just when you think things were as bad as they could get, they got worse. Once outside, Chris said, ‘That was the worst S*!@ I’ve ever eaten.” I agreed with him and used a similar term to describe the pie. The issue here was that Nanny had the kitchen window open and heard the entire conversation. Ugly talk was near the top of the list of things she didn’t put up with. Nanny got each of us by an ear and dragged us to the bathroom. After we both got our mouthes scrubbed out with soap and a toothbrush, we decided that we didn’t like ugly talk either. We also agreed that as bad as getting your mouth washed out with soap is, it’s much better than eating crow pie.
