The day I shot a crow

A very short coming-of-age story.

The day I shot a crow is one I’ll never forget. It was the summer I turned eighteen. We had got back from clay-pigeon shooting with a couple of Pete’s handsome 12-bore shotguns; two of the many guns he owned. Pete had grown up on a farm deep in the Somerset countryside and was the proud owner of a veritable arsenal of weapons. Now we were playing about with air-rifles, as we often did in those days, and as a crow flew low overhead, I took a very rough and ready aim and shot at it. I would never be able to do it again, but this time it somehow came off �" as easy as that, without any thought or consideration at all: Pat!, the pellet travelled straight through the bird’s wing (I think; that’s what I imagined from the sound it made).

What immediately followed was what has often been described as a Deafening Silence: literally deafening in this case, as all I heard, or rather felt, was a rushing inside my head, like air escaping an angry pressure cooker. All the noises around me were blocked out and time itself momentarily ground to a halt. Then I felt guilty. I immediately felt terribly guilty. I had harmed a living creature for no reason other than it was there: it happened to be flying overhead just as I was about to shoot something; anything. The crow faltered in its flight for a brief moment and then continued, ostensibly unperturbed, on its way.

In all the time I had owned an air-rifle I had never shot at a living creature, but this time, for whatever reason �"to show off, or to release my anger�" I did. Pete shot starlings from his bedroom window all the time, without compunction. He collected the corpses in the gutter just below the window: there must have been at least twenty or thirty of them when he showed me the pathetic sight. I had never shot at any living thing; only tin cans, cardboard boxes, stones, sometimes glass bottles. But this time I did. For some inexplicable reason, I did. And it’s the kind of irreversible act, that even as you’re doing it, you already regret. Something similar happened when I was about four or five. I flushed a tiny toy figurine of my brother’s down the toilet. And at the very moment the water started gushing down from the cistern I realised and regretted what I had just done, what I was in the process of doing.

That time it was slightly different, as in my mind there was some logic behind the act: it was an attempt to rid the bowl of the other contents before our mother arrived to rescue the figure that had accidentally fallen into the toilet pan. It might just hang around, bobbing on the surface while everything else disappeared around the S bend. On other occasions, though, there was no thought, no reason, no excuse. The time I thought it would be a good idea to let the hamster have a run around my bedroom while the cat was looking on was one of these. This thoughtless act produced the predictable irreversible result.

All these events in my childhood and youth were lessons to be learnt: whether the underlying explanation for the regrettable actions was a failure to consider the consequences, or whether there was some sinister, destructive force at work inside me, it gradually dawned on me that things would work out better in my adult life if I assessed situations thoughtfully and acted accordingly. Somewhere above the Somerset countryside a crow is flying with a pierced wing: the price it paid several summers ago for a youth to learn a Lesson in Life.