As the corn matured, the crows moved in. Life on our farm was a constant battle with assorted animals wanting our crops. There being hundreds of crows, our focus turned to them. Once, when I was a small boy, I saw a pure white crow, mounted, on Herbert Person's wall. I assume he spread his wild oats broadly around Wing before going where all good crows eventually wind up. Anyhow, the crows who attacked our corn always had a smattering of white-winged crows in the flock. I never was able to point my trusty double barreled twelve gauge at one of them. They were too pretty. One who has never experienced the crow as an enemy cannot possibly appreciate the cunning intelligence of a wild crow. Without a gun, we could get close, like the tame golf course variety of today. But with a gun in our hand, they knew what that meant, and we could get almost in range before they abandoned the ear of corn and flew, laughing and calling to the others, or maybe at us, as they flew.
Mike and I built a blind in the patch. As we entered, one guard crow watched from the tree line. Even if we sat for hours in the blind, not a crow showed. When we finally gave up in disgust, heading for the house, the crows would always flog in and cover the patch when we got out of range.
One day we finally discovered a chink in their armor. A crow does not count well. We both entered the blind, one of us would leave, and the crows would flog in on top of the remaining shooter, discovering their error in math too late.
These crows also provided a source of spending money. The county had a fifty-cent bounty on crow heads, simply show them to the county clerk and collect the reward. However, the first time we proudly sat a fruit jar full of aging crow heads on his desk, he suddenly decided he could trust us. From now on, we would only have to come in and tell him how many we had, he told us, as he fled his desk, covering his nose. Ticks and chiggers were also new to Mike. Me, I had gotten used to them over the years, just scratch it off when you got one. They also served as a good source of entertainment each night before I went to sleep, scratching all my bites good. For Mike, it was different. The first time he saw hundreds of seed ticks crawling up his leg, I thought he was going to throw a runaway.
The summer was drawing to a close. Mike was ready to ride the train three days back to Los Angeles. When he arrived, he got a dog, named him Tooter. He bought traps, and sat out a trap line in the concrete jungle of Los Angeles. All he could catch were cats and ground squirrels, though. He told me this year that the summer in Arkansas influenced the course of his life. He later made many trips into the wilds of the west.
I did not see Mike again until he returned from Vietnam as a demolitions expert, sporting a Teflon orbit around one eye. We visited Wing a couple of days and talked about the old days. When he got back to California, he had a rude awakening. People there did not appreciate him and the other returning veterans. By the time he had completed college, he had had enough. He went to Australia, taught school a couple of years. Then he played basketball on a touring team of displaced American veterans awhile. When he returned to California, pushing thirty, he applied for a teaching job. Remembering his earlier treatment, he did not mention to the Superintendent interviewing him about his war experience. But when the man asked him why, at near thirty, he was just now applying for a job, he came clean. The man, a veteran himself it turns out, stood up, shook his hand, and hired him on the spot. It turned out to be a 30-year job.
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