The Armchair Outfitter

Saturday, November 4, 2006 (Opening Day)

The day begins with a 3:15 wakeup necessitated by the forty minute drive to the area we will be hunting. We are headed to the Glen Elder Wildlife Area, approximately 13,200 acres of land surrounding Waconda Lake. We will meet our friend Rudy and a bunch of other hunters from Kansas. Some background is in order. We met Rudy on a previous trip. The more the merrier on a pheasant hunt, so we fell in with Rudy’s group and hunted together. Over handshakes at the end of the day, Raimey commented that he’d sure enjoyed hunting with Rudy and his friends, including Rudy’s dogs. Now you can’t go wrong praising a man’s friends, but if you praise his dogs, your stock goes way up in his estimation. Rudy responded in kind, and said,”4:30 opening day next year, you know where I’ll be. Right here in this campground.” Raimey replied that it was a “date,” and so began the Kansas Connection.

We arrive at Rudy’s tent and are out of the truck by 5:00 A.M. We greet our friends, and when legal shooting time arrives, we hit the CRP grass behind the campsite. There are about 15 of us in all, and we walk the easy fields quickly with no points or flushes. By 8:00 we have dropped off the near-vertical bluff into the river bottom and we are stomping the cattails. This requires a particular technique Raimey refers to as “high-stepping,” in which you raise your foot until your thigh is perpendicular to the ground and then force it down into the thick bed of native grasses. It is not a natural motion, and there is no way to prepare for the toll it exacts on your body. Raimey tapes his ankles as he did in his football days. I’m wearing neoprene ankle gaiters to keep my socks in place, but it is little comfort.

The first rooster I see flushes as I am picking my way through a stand of saplings. A young man shooting an over-and-under fires two anxious shots, “pop-pop,” as the cock exits the far side of the cover. The bird hasn’t really got his wings under him, and he is no more than five yards ahead of us. The golf-ball-sized pattern fails to connect. Because the shooter has a clear line to the bird, I hesitate, waiting for a third shot that never comes. I don’t immediately realize that owing to the double-barrel, he has shot out. By the time I get my wits about me, the bird is at 70-plus yards, and I have no business shooting at him. I instantly rationalize that if I can wound him, we have enough hunters and dogs to walk him down and put in a finisher. I fire three times, hoping to send a long distance telegram, but he doesn’t sign for it. In response to all the commotion, a hen gets up for what would be a beautiful shot if they were legal.

The afternoon begins rather inauspiciously with a blown hunt. We divide up into two groups. Most of us will stand on the high ground and block, while the smaller group work their way around to the opposite side of a bowl and walk through the low ground pushing back toward us. I am fortunately in the blocking group, and I take advantage of the opportunity to stop walking for a while.

We wait for what seems to be more than enough time for the drivers to come into view and, seeing no hunter orange, we try to raise them on the radio to make sure everyone is O.K. R.J.’s voice comes back tense and irritated. He says there’s a problem; the group has met two hunters on the other side, and they claim that there are others ahead of them. Seeing no one in between us and the other hunters, R.J. explains that we are in position to block that and they will ease on down the hill watching for other hunters. R.J.’s request is denied, so he adopts another tack. Pointing off at a side-hill angle, R.J. suggests that it might be possible to work around the other hunters, but the fellow angrily replies, “I’ve got guys down there too!” We learn later that a heated exchange ends with one of the other “hunters” saying something to the effect of, “We’ve got guns out here, you know.” Wisely, R.J. decides to avoid the confrontation completely and our guys backtrack out the way they entered.

Although this is public access land, none of us has ever had an encounter like this one before or since. We are discussing the matter around the truck in the parking area when two hunters walk out alone. I speak to them as they walk by the lot of us, asking, “Did y’all kill them all?” One of the guys mutters a response, and they get into their truck and leave quickly. It is only when R.J. rounds the back of our truck, red-faced, that I realize they were the other “group” of hunters that were supposedly dispersed over an area of roughly 40 acres. R.J. relates that he believes they might have been drunk, because while they were talking, a rooster got up right underneath them and neither seemed to notice.

One of the Kansas bunch has secured permission to hunt some private land, or “ground” as they call it out there, and we decide that it would be a good idea to go. This will allow us to avoid bumping into our new friends again until they are hopefully either somewhere sleeping it off or in jail. We drive to a beautiful field of milo which should make for easy walking. Unfortunately, the owner’s house is situated such that if we walk parallel to the rows in the “right” direction, we will be pushing birds directly toward the house. It’s a large field, too large for a group our size to position blockers in front of the house and yard, so we walk against the grain, the heads of the unharvested milo at just the correct height to bang our knees with every step. Raimey expresses relief that the milo is only knee-high, as there are worse places to get continually whacked with the heavy seed heads.

In working this field, we kick up more pheasants than I care to count. No one fires a shot, though, as they are all hens. I think to myself that if all these hens raise progeny during the off season, Kansas should have a banner pheasant season in 2007. That is little consolation in 2006, however, standing in the middle of the seemingly endless field with aching legs and feet. Defeated, we plod back to the truck, resolved to return to the walk-in land were we at least saw legal roosters.

Back at Glen Elder, we are row-cropping again, this time in a wheat field. Kirk shoots a fine cock pheasant, and Raimey connects with one also. A younger hunter fires after Raimey, though, and Raimey makes no move to claim the bird. At one point in the afternoon, we are walking along in a widely spread line and two roosters sail parallel to every gunner. Whether from the angle of the sun, fatigue, or the sheer number of hens we’ve seen, nobody calls out or fires a shot until the birds are halfway down the line. It is only after they have passed me that I realize they are fair game. I fire three times, but I’ve started my swing too late and I fail to do any damage.

Kirk kills another bird in the basin before the afternoon is over, but I am not there to witness it. I am sitting on top of the bluff watching the line of hunters make one last pass through the thick stuff. I’m exhausted, and my shooting glasses are fogged up like I’ve been in a sauna. I watch four roosters and two hens glide silently in behind the hunters and light, but I am in no shape to go down after them. One cock and a hen flush far out in front of the advancing line, but none of the hunters has a shot, and legal shooting time fades into early evening.

One of the author’s “black rifles.”

I wrote this piece some time ago, but I read it again after the first reports of the shooting at Northern Illinois University began appearing in the national news. Inevitably, there will be calls for new restrictions on our 2nd Amendment rights and freedoms, but of course these incidents have little to do with firearms and everything to do with our our flawed human nature. Violence and murder have been a part of the fallen creation since Cain and Abel, and no registration, background check, or waiting period could have prevented that.

Here is the story as I originally wrote it. It represents my best recollection of actual events.

Let me begin by saying that I am a Tazukia Possum, and I will be one until the day I die. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I guess I should explain what a Tazukia Possum is, exactly. Tazukia is a county in rural West Tennessee, just above the Mississippi state line, and the Possum is the Tazukia High School mascot. Their colors are pink and black, like the ‘80s metal band Twisted Sister, and at sporting events they hold up both hands, wriggle their fingers, and shout, “Eeeeeeeeeeee!” Oh, and one more thing I guess you should know. The Possums aren’t real. Neither is Tazukia county, or at least not in the conventional sense. I’ll try to explain.

When I was in high school, in McNairy County, Tennessee, which incidentally is just north of the Mississippi state line, I was a loser. That was O.K., because I had friends, and they all were losers too. I didn’t think so, of course, but everyone else did. My friends were mostly band geeks, and I was an Academic Decathlete, which in my mind made me the Loser King. I wasn’t cool enough for band, for Christ’s sake! Needless to say, I don’t have many warm, fuzzy memories of my high-school days. School was something you had to endure, along with acne, your parents, and enough male hormones to drop a bull elephant.

One day in the gym, as we wallowed in our geekiness and wondered if anyone would notice if we all just suddenly disappeared, one of my friends had an idea. Well, it wasn’t really an idea, more of a musing or a daydream. He said, “What if we went to another school where we were cool? What if we ruled the school like the preps and jocks do here?” This was my friend Tom. At least I think it was Tom. He died just after graduation in a car accident, so I guess we’ll never know unless another Possum corrects me. At any rate, this sounded like a brilliant notion to me. “What would our mascot be?” I asked, keen to hear anything that might distract me from the quotidian misery of school. “The possum,” he said, “We’d be the Tazukia County Possums.” We do have a lot of possums where I grew up. More than you can shake a stick at, in fact, although I’m not sure why anyone would want to. They are not generally frightened by sticks, or by cars either judging from road-kill statistics.

We went on to discuss the Possum colors and the Possum Salute, which consisted of extending both arms full length over your head, wriggling your fingers, and shouting, “Eeeeeeeee!” This was intended to simulate a possum trapped in the glare of automobile headlights, but I have never actually heard one make that sound. They might, for all I know. Either way, I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever heard of. Just the thought that in another place, we could be accepted, that we could actually be cool, was like a fire burning in my brain. I guess I wasn’t the only one, either, because over the ensuing days, the Possum talk continued. One guy, I think it was Trevor, colored all his spiral-bound notebooks pink and black. Someone designed a Possum symbol incorporating the letters T.P. We all gave the Possum salute in the hallways, and I thought that would be the end of it. Then, as they say in stories like this, a funny thing happened.

People started to ask questions. Classmates, teachers even, wanted to know why the pink and black, why the wriggling fingers, what’s all this Possum stuff about? I don’t know why to a man we all had the presence of mind to say, “It’s a secret, I can’t tell you.” I guess the truth would have been just another boxcar of shame hitched to the long train of self-consciousness that we were all laboriously pulling. Far from satisfying the inquiries, however, this secrecy only heightened the public curiosity. Everyone was talking about the Possums! Well, everyone but the actual Possums, of course. We held a “meeting” and swore each other to secrecy. I don’t even remember the member list, because there never really was one. After all, we didn’t exist. If the truth ever got out, we’d be so embarrassed that we all really would have to find another school.

As the school year wore on, the Possum phenomenon grew. Our teachers and principal were closely monitoring Possum activities to make sure that nothing nefarious was happening on school grounds. Cheerleaders (!), cheerleaders who we imagined might someday actually speak to us, returned the Possum salute at football games. I’m sure many opposing teams wondered why a McNairy Central Bobcat would scream, “Eeeeeeeee!” After all, it wasn’t really that intimidating a battle cry.

I guess the next step was inevitable. People began asking us how to become members. They wanted to belong to our made-up club! We dismissed these inquiries by telling people that you couldn’t ask to join, you had to be invited. We added that there was a secret ceremony, which was different for every Possum initiate, and that members were forbidden to reveal the humiliating details of their individual ordeal. I was certain that this would quell the Possum furor, and that people would return to ignoring us as they had for years. Instead, the buzz about the new “secret society” swelled to a fever pitch. One Possum, I think it was Colby, suggested that we actually let some people join. His logic was that we had started the Possums because we felt left out, excluded. What fine hypocrites we’d all be in the end if we excluded other people.

At another meeting, it was agreed that any founding member could sponsor a new Possum. Upon a vote of the “membership”, an offer would be extended to the potential Possum. The actual invitation was always delivered anonymously and said something to the effect of: “Potential Possum, this is your invitation. Be ready at any time for initiation. You will not know the time and place.” An admonition to destroy the note, or eat it or something, always followed. The initiation itself was designed and conducted by the sponsoring member. A condition of membership was that you never reveal your particular initiation rite. It was fairly innocuous stuff, like having your head flushed in a toilet, a swirley, as we called it. One female member, whose nickname would be “Pickle” from initiation forward, had to get the attention of the entire lunchroom crowd and lick whipped cream from an enormous pickle. I couldn’t believe that our classmates would be willing to do anything at all, even something trivial, just for the privilege of hanging out with people, namely us, with whom no one had ever considered hanging out a privilege.

The whole Possum experience taught me something about human nature, insecurity, and the need to belong that I’ll never forget. Maybe it’s a manifestation of the herd mentality. We broke off from the main group, but we never could have imagined that others would want to stampede along with us. I thought about the Possums when those kids at Columbine went berserk, as I do every time some isolated, loner kids lash out at society in a public way. I wish they knew that a private rebellion is the best kind, the kind where everybody gets to walk away. In the end, all of the original Possums graduated. Some of us listed “Tazukia Possum” in the activities section of the school yearbook, and the annual staff actually printed it. I guess they didn’t know any better. My friends and I have all moved to different states, but we call our fantasy football league the “Tazukia Possums.” I was wrong at the beginning when I said that Tazukia and the Possums aren’t real. They were always real for me.

“When a man is proud of his dog and shows it, I like him. When his dog is proud of him and shows it, I deeply respect him.”

- Gene Hill