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Sample
Garden Variety Crows
- Crows aren't easily
fazed. You don't just leap out from behind the corner of
the house and shout, "Boo!" and expect to see them
scatter to the four winds. They probably wouldn't even
raise an eyebrow, actually. The most you might
reasonably expect would be for them to hop a few feet
sideways and continue digging up your newly seeded peas,
the organic ones, the ones without the pink fungicide
coating. That pink stuff might look like caramel
popcorn, but it tastes so bad. Crows have pride. Respect,
though&emdash;well, they don't have much of that. For
moments of disrespect, I have just the thing: a
scarecrow. His name is Chubby, and he is five years old.
For a spine he has a six-foot long 2 x 2 and for a head
an empty plastic milk jug, nailed firmly to the top of
his spine with a two-and-a-half inch spike. His face is
an old burlap sack that once even had an expression of
smug contentment, painted on with a widetipped black felt
pen. After five years of sun and rain and snow, though,
the world has pretty well succeeded in wiping the smile
completely off Chubby's face. He wears a red Bardahl cap
and an old pink and tan checked shirt stuffed with a
length of black plastic sheeting from a pallet of
lumber. His jeans have huge holes in the knees and are
bleached and faded by the sun and stiff from the rain.
They, too, are stuffed with scraps of black plastic
sheeting and are tied at his waist with a length of hemp
twine. When he was new and I drove him in among the
tenfoot-tall sunflowers, Chubby cut a pretty striking
figure, albeit a portly one, but he doesn't look very
imposing now. He has fallen over too many times in
windstorms, face-first into the mud. To keep him on his
feet, I finally lashed him to the end post of a
raspberry trellis last fall. There he remains, cinched
to the post with a loop of wire around his neck. Chubby
has become a part of the scenery&emdash;even the red of
his cap is so faded that it blends in with the muted
colours of the spring garden. The crows must think so,
too. The other morning I found one of them, like a
Tsimshian chief in all his ceremonial regalia, calmly and
without expression&emdash;but with great
curiosity&emdash;walking up and down the rows of onions
I had just planted, plucking the onion sets from the
ground and tossing them to the side. I don't have a clue
what he was looking for&emdash;it couldn't have been
onions: he didn't eat, or even try to eat, a single one
of those. I went out and chased him away, waving my arms
and yelling. It took me ten minutes to straighten out the
onion patch, and, you know, I think he was doing it just
for the joke of it. He had made me into a scarecrow. I
gave Chubby a sour look.
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