Or, death of a chicken
In a few days, the bird would be dead. I would be her executioner. And I feel a need to relate the events that preceded the death, not because the fowl and I were overmuch close (we were not), nor to assuage a guilt (though there is always blame to hand around after such things), but because as E. B. White wrote of his own barnyard loss, she suffered in a suffering world. And pain deserves to be marked, even when it wears the confetti of farce, and though the only thing we have left to offer afterward is words, useless as they are.
It was difficult to know where to place my anger. True, the dog had trespassed. But the neighbor was contrite. And I had known about the hole in the fence for weeks. Winter squats heavily around the few acres I call Poverty Flats, though, and the list of spring repairs was long, and I am slow and generally loath to deal with any repair that requires use of any tool more sophisticated than a hammer, to say nothing of fence tighteners and in-line straighteners. Now the chicken had paid for human laxity on all sides, and for a dog being a dog.
There was an inexorableness to the event. My few western acres sit between mountain ranges where the land opens like a lap, a brief pause in geography that permits domesticity and also lays the table for the creatures that would dine upon it. Between the red-tailed hawks perched on the electrical wires that lope beside the county road and the coyotes that sing on the hill, the life expectancy of a chicken is not long here. One hopes for life, but expects death.
So the red hen was gone. I found a second injured bird cowering beneath a pyracantha. She did not resist when I picked her up. The dog had delivered a solid bite to her rear. On such occasions, one is made aware of how much of a chicken isn’t chicken at all, but instead simply feathers and air: an illusion of poultry. Without her tail and covert feathers, which the dog had removed in toto, the bird now resembled only the front end of her former self. Friends who heard about the attack inquired how many hens remained. I replied truthfully, “Four and a half.”
The chickens had arrived the previous spring, unasked for, like most of life’s obligations. The teenaged daughters of a friend had pronounced my empty henhouse forlorn and returned the next week with a cardboard box containing a half dozen chicks. I kept them in the house beneath a heat lamp, unnamed until certain they would survive, like pioneer children. When you live in the country, as I do, it is easy to acquire animals. Friends that see you own land assume you wish to fill it, an empty field to their eyes seeming an injury to Protestant industry. Over the years, my desire not to offend their generosity has nearly led to ownership of several dogs, three or four geese, and a barn full of mousing cats. There had been talk of a horse to stand in the overgrown paddock, and a few sheep to keep the horse company. In this way, a single man at middle age who lacks resolution soon becomes a bachelor farmer without having bought a single head of livestock.
At the feed store in town, I sought advice about the chicks. It is one of those stores that used to be common in rural places but is rare nowadays—dimly lit, a dog sleeping in the aisle, the pale smell of dry goods in the unmoving air. On the sidewalk, a sign displays a new joke every few days. I asked Katrina behind the counter what young chickens like to eat. She nodded over her shoulder at the bags of chick starter in the rear.
“Any of ’em roosters?” she said.
“How can you know?” I asked. Through the window, the sign read: i wonder if tacos ever think about me.
“Hard to tell at first,” Katrina said. “I had that problem once. Turned out I had two.” She let the gravity of this dilemma percolate, then she leaned over the counter. “Took ’em out for a midnight walk.” She nodded in the slow way of a conspirator.
Muffy had been a handsome bird. Along with her sister, she was the largest of the flock, squash-colored, with the classically curved back of the breed, a white feather-duster rump and a modest but proud sail of a comb. Both were consistent layers of large brown eggs. Muffy was particularly fond of shade and languor, and she spent warm spring days beneath the lilacs wallowing in dust baths where she suffocated mites.
Each morning, though, upon hearing the screen door slam, which signaled the arrival of the bucket of table scraps, composure abandoned her. She appeared at a sprint with the other hens, her large body yawing from drumstick to drumstick like a chunky child who chases the ice cream truck. After feasting, Muffy roosted for hours atop an overturned stock tank in the yard and watched the horses graze in the neighbor’s field. Orpingtons are poor flyers, and she was no exception. She gravely considered even the shortest drop back to earth before undertaking. Once airborne, she had the glide path of a watermelon.
Sometimes, in the course of other chores, I bent low to examine a hen’s comb for pox. When I did so, the bird in question froze and crouched and allowed herself to be inspected. I scooped her up and carried her in the crook of an arm around the yard and spoke soothingly to her. I told myself the hens also enjoyed these encounters and that this signaled a growing bond between man and bird—even if upon being set down once more, the hen always gave herself a thorough shake, like St. Paul dusting off his sandals at the city limits of Antioch.
“Your hens consider you the rooster,” said Daren, a rancher and man of wood-plank Norwegian practicality. “They crouch because they think you’re going to mount them.” This information cast these interactions with the chickens in a more tawdry light and made me reach for them less often. After that, our relationship became strictly mercantile: If I had nothing to offer, they scattered at my approach. Any move by me toward the shed where the bin of black oil sunflower seeds were stored, however, and they followed close on my heels. In return, they laid more eggs than I could eat. In summer when insects were their chief diet—ants being plentiful, and grasshoppers in August—their yolks took on the color of a sunset and tasted good enough that I presented them as gifts to friends in the city.
Muffy had been a handsome bird. Along with her sister, she was the largest of the flock, squash-colored, with the classically curved back of the breed, a white feather-duster rump and a modest but proud sail of a comb.
***
But let us return to the day of the incident: now I had an injured bird to deal with. And it is hard not to have some feeling for whom one provides daily care, even if that care goes unacknowledged. (I imagine this is what it is like to have a teenager in the house.) Friends had been invited to the house for the evening, and though events had left a stain on the day and I no longer felt in the mood for company, the excuse of a dead chicken seemed a poor one. We sat on the patio in the cooling dusk, the injured Muffy at our feet. Craig, a friend, lifted the bird, turned her rear-first, and considered her cloaca for a long time, as if he expected tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers to appear.
“Not gonna make it,” he announced finally, and he reached into his pocket for the jackknife that resided there. “I can take care of her for you.” Craig spends his days riding on the valley’s rural ambulance service, and the quickness with which he was willing to dispatch a life unnerved me. Instead, I followed the advice of Sarah, Daren’s wife and a sometimes doula. She advised an indoor convalescence, with regular cleaning of the wound.
Here I must confess that my sympathy for the chicken was not unpolluted. I am at best a reluctant landowner, more in love with the views the land provides than the unceasing work required to steward even my smallest curve of earth. I don’t find the work ennobling. During chores, my eyes always wander to the horizon. I want things to go easy. The hen’s struggle had disrupted the quiet ticking of the place. Her injury had breached the unspoken contract between us, upon which my laissez-faire philosophy depended. I was newer to life in the country, then, and didn’t understand that a barnyard isn’t a place but a series of unforeseen emergencies—irrigation leaks and downed fences and sudden illnesses. Something, living or not, is always breaking. Life is a daily war against entropy.
That night I prepared a small crate for in the house, lining its floor with yesterday’s news about inflation and Israel. I swabbed the backside of the traumatized hen with antiseptic and placed her inside. Then animal and man sat down and waited. For several days, very little happened. I hadn’t known that a chicken could experience shock. Sarah took a turn, cleaning her with care. The hen slowly began to recover. Two weeks after the attack, on a caressing day in April when the lilacs were in bud, I carried the box outside and lifted the injured chicken onto the soft warm grass for her to eat.
The other hens attacked. The sight of Muffy’s wound, and her bare skin, sent them into a frenzy. The Easter Eggers pursued her with particular ruthlessness. Already they had forgotten their flock-mate. Muffy cowered beneath the mock orange beside the front door. A second attempt at integration the next morning failed again. A man will reconsider the choices he has made while running down vindictive poultry at dawn, the hem of his bathrobe sodden with dew.
“They’ll bully her until they reestablish the pecking order,” said Katrina at the feed store, to which I had retreated. Outside, the sign mocked my incompetence: i want to grow my own food, but i can’t find bacon seeds. “Put her in the coop at night when it’s dark and they can’t see her,” she said. “That will help reintroduce her back to the flock.
“But that’s not your only problem,” she said. “Chickens will peck at the sight of blood. You need to cover it up.” She chinned toward the rear of the store. The bottle of Rooster Booster Pick-No-More was small, expensive, its liquid purple and thick like sap. It was a toss-up who was less content, the squawking bird whose tender rear had to be finger-painted to aubergine each morning, or the reluctant painter who applied the salve. The chicken and I were bound together now.
by Christopher Soloman, Orion | Read more:
Image: the author
