Which made it comforting to be at the top of the food chain.
Its something “citified” folks have a hard time wrapping their head around, but on the farm you take that cute little calf, or piglet or chick, feed them, care for them, nurse them when necessary, sometimes even play with them. And when they grow up, they show up on your dinner plate. It’s the circle of life.
Today’s story is about the chickens.
This handsome fellow is called a “houdan” and we had a few of them because my father liked exotic birds of all kinds. But most of the fowl pecking grain and scratching dirt around the yard were just plain old ordinary chickens, and since they ran free one of my chores was to track down the eggs they laid – not as easy a job as you might think since their nests could be anywhere there was a bit of straw...the cow barn had an infinite number of nooks and crannies, as did the half dozen outbuildings and, in the summer, even various spots scattered around the grove and barnyard.
For a couple years we sold the excess eggs to the neighbors as a way to make a few extra bucks – collecting, washing, packaging and bicycling them around on an “egg route.”
One day, I was inspecting a wall of nesting boxes in the sheep barn (which in my grandparents’ day was a chicken house) when I came upon a small Bantam hen...curious, because we didn’t have any Bantam chickens that I knew of. She sat there with a defiant glare in her eyes, head cocked to one side daring me to try to steal her egg. Banties could be like that I’d heard. They were tiny little birds but in their own deluded, pea-sized brains they thought they were as big as an ostrich. Foghorn Leghorn’s chicken hawk suffered from the same delusion – apparently a common malady among domestic and cartoon birds.
I carefully reached out, intending to explore beneath the fowl for an egg, but was immediately chastised by a sharp peck to the back of my hand. Yeeowch! She wasn’t going to give it up easily. A second attempt and she drew blood with her needle-sharp beak. I could have fetched a pitchfork and had shish-kebabbed chicken for dinner, but I decided, “Fine, keep your frickin’ egg,” and moved on to the next nest. Engaging in a battle of wills with a teacup-sized chicken wasn’t on my “to-do” list for the day.
Upon completion of my appointed rounds, as I was leaving the shed I glanced at the offending Banty’s box and was pleased to see that she had apparently wearied of her egg-sitting duties and had vacated the premises. In her place was left a perfectly white egg. A big one, too. I don’t know how that egg came out of that little chicken’s butt.
Yet, there it was, spinning in place, floating about three inches above the straw.
Now, you might think that finding levitating eggs would be a common occurrence on a farm, but you would be wrong. I was just as astonished as anyone might be upon finding an object of any kind floating in mid air (allowances being made for Kresge’s helium balloons and the occasional bloated toad that would drift in from the drainage pond on hot summer days).
I studied the egg for a few minutes from a safe distance, half expecting it to explode or attack or whatever levitating eggs do, and finally said, “Screw it,” and grasped it in my hands. It took a surprising amount of resistance to stop it from spinning, made even more difficult because I was being very careful not to apply too much pressure lest I crack the shell and end up with a sticky albumen/yolk concoction squishing through my fingers. When I finally did get it quieted, it nestled in my hands emitting what I can only describe as an inaudible hum (I could hear it, even though technically there wasn’t any sound that could ever have been recorded) and it immediately leapt a couple inches skyward, floated back to its nesting box and resumed its rotation the
second I released my grip.
Over the next few days, my family grappled with the best course of action to take re: miraculous egg, and eventually settled on a “wait and see” approach. Farm folk don’t go in much for publicity, preferring to analyze ramifications before committing themselves to an action they might later regret. So we watched and waited.
And the egg hummed along.
After a few weeks, we decided that the daily checking-up on our charge in a hot, smelly sheep barn was a less than ideal situation and gently relocated the calcium-shelled orb to the kitchen where proper eggs belonged. There it drifted over to the window and took up station, tumbling end over end, gently bumping into the glass as if it was gazing longingly out at the gas barrel. Later that night, when returning to the house after chores, I opened the door and was immediately engulfed in a buzzing cloud of bumblebees that had filled the room. Not only the standard yellow and black versions, but also purple ones, red and green ones, blue ones(!) – a whole rainbow of teeming angry bees. They wheeled about my head in a kaleidoscopic bee-tornado, and I got zapped a couple times on my legs, wrist and neck before I could beat a hasty retreat out the door. I had to run as far as the mailbox at the end of the driveway before the last tenacious insect gave up the chase and bumbled away. In my haste I’d left the door open, and now watched from a safe distance as the vortex of bees exited the house and dispersed, followed by the egg, which tumbled nonchalantly through the air, crossed the yard and regained its favored base of operations, spinning gleefully three inches above the bottom of its nesting box.
So be it. Whatever (un)natural force was at work there didn’t like to have its routine disturbed.
Over the next few weeks there were an increasingly alarming number of “chicken-related” incidents. The bees would return every time we had scrambled eggs for breakfast – buzzing and bumping noisily against the screen on our dining room window, although thankfully they seemed to lose interest and drift away after the meal was completed. The chickens in general seemed to get more feisty during egg gathering, defending their potential progeny with increasing fervor. I took to wearing heavy leather welding gloves to thwart their mostly ineffective attacks (after all, how much damage can a five-pound chicken really do?) The answer to that no-longer rhetorical question came when we found the remains of a bloody and mangled stray cat seemingly pecked to death in the barnyard. There were a few feathers in his mouth, but he obviously got the worst end of the deal.
Then there was the day we were playing “war” with rotten eggs. Again, for my city friends who don’t know, there’s a reason for the term, “smells like rotten eggs.” Sometimes we would miss finding a nest and the eggs would sit and marinate for weeks in the summer heat. The resulting egg “grenades” produced a smell so foul upon breaking that they could gag a maggot (I haven’t thought of that junior high expression for decades.) Upon discovering this fantastic property, we of course, said, “Hey! Let’s throw them at each other!” They were the ideal armament, having the benefit of being non-lethal (even a shot to the face wouldn’t seriously injure you) yet had the weapons-worthy benefit of carrying that inside-of-a-skunk’s-ass odor. Amazingly, no one barfed, even after sustaining multiple direct hits. Growing up on a farm has a way of immunizing you against even the most eye-watering, disgusting smells.
During the whole run of World-War-Farm the chickens were watching. I saw them poking their pointy little heads around from behind the silo, popping out sporadically from behind a grain bin and staring with their beady little chicken eyes at us from the safety of the rock pile. They seemed relatively unperturbed by our activities until unfortunately (as it would turn out) we ran out of of rancid eggs and turned to the fresh ones as substitute.
The second that first yolk broke the fowl emerged from their hiding places, let out an enraged squawk! and formed a skirmish line in front of the sheep barn. Behind them the Egg (yes, we had taken to capitalizing it by then) spun furiously in the doorway, erratically jerking about and emitting an high-pitched shreik.
What came next, I have documented in my story Leaves and Losses. My dog began to bark and growl. Curious, I walked over to see what was causing his distress. Nothing looked amiss, but I could hear a crackling sound like someone walking through dry leaves – odd, because it was mid July and the nearest dry leaf was somewhere in the Sonoran Desert. Then, with a mighty CRACK! one of the main branches of an enormous maple tree tore loose and fell, limbs and leaves crashing down around me. As it dropped, it clipped the corner of the house sending a seismic shudder through the structure (and in a rather telling comment on my accident-prone nature as a youth, my mother’s first reaction was to look up from her book and say, “What on earth did Joe do now?”)
If the main branch hadn’t missed my head by inches I would have been a foot shorter and six feet under.
When I finally extricated myself from the tangled mass of branches I saw the roosters and hens nod knowingly to each other then turning on their heels, followed the Egg while walking single-file back into the shed.
It was beginning to look like you really didn’t want to fuck with our chickens.
Now, you might think that we had learned our lesson and left the birds to their own devices after that, but you would be wrong (hmm, second time I’ve said that.)
No. Just like a Shakespearian tragedy we decided that we had to reassert our status as masters of the food chain and remind our wayward fowl just who was boss around those parts. So, out came the chicken-catcher (a long wire with a handle on one end and a small u-shaped shepherd’s hook on the other, used for snaring birds by their feet or necks) and the machete.
I won’t go into detail about the carnage that followed, but there is dreadful truth behind the phrase, “Flopping around like chickens with their heads cut off.”
The Egg, of course, didn’t take kindly to the slaughter and ricocheted around howling like a banshee. Then, before the last machete chop had finished echoing off the walls, it emerged from the confines of the sheep barn and hung in the air in front of the door spinning madly. Its pitch began to rise like a siren, and when it reached its crescendo the cow barn burst into flames. Ignoring our own safety, we dashed madly into the barn and and drove the livestock outside before they were roasted alive (not an easy task, as lacking any Frankensteinian reference for “fire...bad,” their little calf brains seemed incapable of realizing their impending doom. They just wanted to stay in their lifelong home, flames be damned.) The blaze shot into the sky one hundred feet high and they said you could see the glow for miles around. Nothing burns like a fifty year-old wooden barn filled with dried hay. By the time the fire engines arrived the only thing left to do was hose down the surrounding buildings so they didn’t catch fire too.
The Egg retreated to its hutch.
After that we threw in the towel. We pragmatically resisted our first impulse to get out the baseball bats and smack the Egg into the next county. It could bob and weave like Muhammed Ali and we figured anything that could cause an entire barn to spontaneously burst into flames could probably do the same to any puny human’s head who might foolish enough to take a swing at it.
These events took place forty years ago. In the intervening years birds have been arriving on our farm from all corners of the country. There are thousands of them now, and believe me, it doesn’t cost chicken-feed to keep them supplied with chicken-feed. They’ve taken over every building, lining the rafters, sitting on the roofs, cocking their heads sideways and glaring down at us with derision as we walk below.
We just let them stay.
We know our place in the food chain.
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