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Sparkle (1)
I feel completely out of touch with our chicks.
It may have something to do with being away from home for a few days immediately after they arrived, though I suspect it may be more, well, more deliberate than that.
Deliberate, yet subconscious. As though my superego is encouraging me to keep my distance. Perhaps I'll have a strange dream about chicken avoidance, similar, in strangeness, at least, to the one I had two nights ago about my mother driving us right up alongside a black bear while I screamed for her to gun it. The gas, not the bear. I don't know how they're connected either, but this at least gives a reference point for my strange animal dreams (which, by the way, are completely different from my strange action-adventure dreams).
As I type this, JR is in his workshop, the chicks' temporary home, communing with them. Sure, I've fed and watered them a few times, but I'm not involved in these chicks like I have been with others that have come to live here. In the past, I'd been known to sit for hours, mesmerized by their jerky motions, the mad dashes across their pen, the pig-piling (I'm not sure why this shouldn't be species-specific. Chick-piling is what these guys do.), and the one or two chicks that take more than a passing interest in we humans.
Our first shipment of chickens arrived nearly seven years ago. We had ordered all hens—25 in all—and Murray McMurray threw in (well, I'm sure they gently placed in) one exotic chick, later named—most creatively, might I add—E.B. That's short for Exotic Bird.
Two of the Rhode Island Reds in that flock turned out to be roosters. One, the Beta, we sent to live on a friend's farm where he would have the benefit of being the Alpha, and the (no, not the Omega) Casanova to a medium-sized hen harem. The rooster that stayed behind was a mean bastard. I still have the talon scars on my calf to prove it, and I'll never forget what a ruddy-colored rooster with iridescent green tail feathers looks like as it flies through the air at you sideways, feet first. Here's a hint: the scare doesn't come from the prehistoric feet aimed squarely at you. You know those are going to hurt. It's the absolute hatred in the rooster's eyes as he sails toward you, in super slo-mo, that will frighten you for years, long after the talon tears in your leg have scabbed over and the scabs have fallen off. Leaving, of course, purple talon-tear scars.
Nonetheless, it was a sad day when I pulled into my spot in the driveway just before Christmas three years ago to the sight of what I thought were leaves strewn all across the yard. Only the leaves were ruddy on the wide end, lighter on the thin end. And we had already raked up all the leaves that had fallen. Neighborhood pit bulls had played tug of war with our mean-ass rooster, leaving only his feathers in clumps on the lawn as evidence that he had existed.
This year, our remaining hens, nearly seven years old, stared laying eggs again in the spring. They take a winter hiatus, which, if you're interested in the fine art of chicken hypnosis and/or absurd first-time chicken-keeper stories, you can read about here.
We were grateful for the return to production, though our original flock of 26 had been culled to just seven over the years.
E.B. had long ago flown the coop. I say that not as a cliche, but as what E.B. actually did. Birds of a feather do truly flock together—I mean it—and E.B. had roosted nightly on her own, up on a perch three feet above the other hens. One day, she finally decided she had had enough.
After days passing without an E.B. sighting, we sat in our every-night-sit-and-chat chairs in the garden. The topic turned to chickens, and JR asked me whether I had seen E.B. lately. Like synchronized swimmers, only without the flowery rubber caps, we turned our heads simultaneously in the direction of a movement just beyond our coop, in the neighbor's yard.
Looking back at us—with just one eye, of course, as they can only give side-eye, being chickens and all—was E.B. She locked her singular eye with ours, then turned abruptly, and waddled away toward the creek and the treeline there, where
