Part 2
The rooster struts
like a king, high-stepping his fiefdom and puffed up with self-importance. But
should a hawk glide overhead, he’s the first to run for cover. The flock crowds
together in mass squawking confusion, the chaos of a blitzkrieg, the theater
full of smoke. Chickens are vulnerable but they aren’t stupid. They have a
highly developed sixth sense when it comes to the hawk flying overhead.
Now, back to the rooster in question from Part I (below), you couldn’t turn your back on him or he’d stab you in the ankle with his spurs. Grown large over time and covered with keratin, they were sharp as spears. He was horny as a goat. As soon as we opened the door to the coop, the hens rushed out to grab the first worm or the unsuspecting grasshopper, but he’d jump on them in dizzying succession, servicing the flock of fifty within a minute. We often wondered, how much fun could that be?
WILSON
One of our customers taught middle school, and
she had a 6-egg incubator in the classroom. The kids loved watching the
process, typically 21 days, from the first movement inside the egg, to a crack
in the shell, to the chick emerging wet and dazed. Her success rate was
phenomenal until the year only one hatched from the incubator. The children
grew fond of him and named him Wilson from the Tom Hanks film, the lone
survivor. But as Wilson sprouted the early markings of a rooster nobody wanted
to take him home, and she asked us if we’d take him back.
At the time we were minus a rooster as the
old keratin-laden maniac had met his match at the sawed-off end of a golf club
after he jumped on the back of a 5-year-old. We liked having a rooster, the
sound of crowing at the full moon in the middle of the night and at the first
streak of day, so we said yes. We met her in town and she handed over the box
with the silent weight of Wilson inside.
Wilson was mannerly, not as "puffed up" as his predessor. He might jump the hens, but he did it in gentlemanly fashion. A discerning rooster, he even let them forage first and pull worms from the wet soil before he’d jump on their backs.
Once a hen nabbed a frog and Oh! the commotion! The entire flock
on her heels as she raced around the enclosure to guard her treat. They all
wanted a piece of that frog, but Wilson just bobbed his way calmly along the
poultry fence looking for his own treat.
Then came the summer of the mink.
One morning we found a hen dead and gutted
inside the coop. The next morning, another. We set traps outside the poultry
fence, suspecting a mink, but a mink is too wily to be tempted by a trap,
regardless of the bait.
Then one morning it was poor Wilson,
bloodied and torn, feathers everywhere as if he’d put up a good fight, guarding
the hens. We buried Wilson next to Malcolm, our adopted cat that had spent his
evenings outside the fence watching the way a cat watches, and we wonder now if
that’s why we never had a mink problem until he died of old age.
The rest of that summer, our chickens were
picked off one-by-one, then two-by-two; sometimes nothing left but piles of
feathers and a stray bloodied limb. In spite of the traps set and the holes in
the floor we patched and reinforced, the mink always found a way in until there
were only six left. We gathered the six up one night when they were roosting
(crowded together in a corner of the roost staring fretfully at the floor) and took them down the road to
my sister’s coop where they at least stood a chance.
Later that fall, when I was cutting grass
for the last time, I noticed something black jutting out of the grass by the
ditch. As I went over to investigate, I realized it was one
wing from a Black Australorp pointed at the sky. All that remained of a flock
of fifty and one rooster named Wilson.
