If you’re like me, you know who Phill is and you’ve seen the movie “The Grey” featuring the incomparable Liam Neeson.
But just in case you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll explain. Phill is one of my oldest friends, a local angler, avid hunter and frequent star of Tripple Overtime — especially when he’s picking out tile at Lowe’s or saving tourists from Septima during Shark Week.
Liam Neeson, of course, is the guy whose daughter gets taken by Albanian gang members in “Taken” ... and then by the gang leader’s father and brother in “Taken 2.” I’m not sure what happens in “Taken 3” yet, but they’ve gotta be running out of “takers,” so my guess would be that his daughter gets taken by the guy who does the Albanian gang’s taxes at H&R Block or something. I mean, at this point you would think he would just stop letting her leave the house or at least pay the 99 cents for a good geolocation app.
However, when Neeson isn’t blatantly disregarding advances in modern technology, he’s starring in suspense thrillers like “The Grey” — where he gets stranded in the Alaskan wilderness after a plane crash, with a group of oil men, while they’re stalked by a pack of gray wolves. They get picked off one by one, until only Neeson is left and finds himself in the wolf den going up against the pack leader (who clearly doesn’t have Netflix in said wolf den if he was foolish enough to try and take down Neeson).
The screen cuts to black before anything happens but, obviously, Neeson domesticates the wolf and trains it to track the scent of mobile devices.
While Sussex County doesn’t have Neeson to save us from gray wolves, we do have Phill to save us from coyotes — which I was shocked to find out even existed in the area when Phill told me he couldn’t go see “Taken 3” last week because he was going coyote hunting instead.
I laughed at first. Then I got a great column idea. Then I saw he was serious and had the camouflage rifle to prove it, looking ready to sneak up on a preying coyote like Neeson on an Albanian sex-trafficker.
My friend Rick, who recently celebrated the 35th anniversary of his 35th birthday party, thinks that Phill’s coyote hunting strategy would be more effective sitting in a lawn chair with a cooler and a baseball bat in his back yard — but I, for one, am glad that Phill is out there.
There may have only been one reported coyote killed and harvested during the initial coyote season last winter and only an estimated 50 to 100 coyotes residing in Delaware’s roughly 2,000 square miles, but according to DNREC, the coyote population is growing. They’ve been spotted in Sussex County, too, and could pose a threat to small farm animals and pets, such as dogs and cats.
DNREC also says that coyotes are unpredictable, adaptable to change and quick to learn new ways of survival — you know, pretty much exactly like Liam Neeson in “The Grey.”
But as terrifying as nocturnal Neeson-like coyotes sound, Sussex County can sleep soundly knowing that Phill is out there at night, starring down the barrel of his camouflage-rifle. That is, unless Liam Neeson reads “Tripple Overtime” and casts Phill to help him and his wolf track down his daughter in “Taken 4” — you know, after she gets taken by the gang’s accountant’s fourth-cousin once removed or something.