Free Range Rooster
by Ella Clark

Ella Clark raises chickens in West Cornwall, Connecticut. Her previously published work has appeared in The Cornwall Chronicle and The Barrytown Explorer.

I grew up in a house between the woods and the farm, and spent as much time outside the house as possible. If I wasn't climbing the trees or riding through the woods, I'd go up to the barn and watch Mr. Schweter milk the cows, feed the goats and pigs and sheep, and tend the guinea hens and chickens. He was German and kept things very orderly; there was, for example, always just one rooster for the flock, and he was always called Peter, and Mr. Schweter told me that he was making a great exception when he let me in the chicken house because it was bad luck for a woman, even a little seven-year-old woman, to go in there. I was an obedient child, and I did not question his wisdom or authority.

An Orderly Universe

In the orderly universe of my own youth, death played a part, death both orderly and disorderly, but death was for animals. I knew that if our cow Victress (she had been born during the war while my father was away) had a male calf, he would have to be killed. And every fall Mr. Schweter slaughtered three of the pigs and hung them on a limb of the maple tree where we had our swing. I suppose that was because it was the biggest maple near the barn, and had the handiest limb around, but it did mean that for a week or so the pumping of my bony legs would bring me up, up, UP through the last shimmering leaves of autumn till I was eye to eye with the grinning faces of creatures who had once been my intimate friends. Over the past year, I had visited them in the pig sty up on the hill behind the chicken coop, bringing old bread and cookies, and they, as piglets, had even visited my brother and me when we had the measles, piglets warm and tightskinned and tiny-hoofed trotting neatly over the sheets. And here they were, big, grown-up, upside-down, dead.

The disorderly deaths were of course messier: the nest of rabbits my father snicked into with the sickle bar while haying, the baby lamb whose unborn body got stuck inside its mother so we had to call the vet who pulled it out piece by piece.

I even caused a disorderly death myself back then: one misty morning early I saw the cat on a slope by the back field; she had a live baby rabbit in her mouth. I ran as fast as I could, yelling as I ran, at which she dropped her prey but, slipping on the dewy grass I fell on the rabbit. It went limp. I'd killed it. I think that this was the first time I had killed anything bigger than a wasp. But, of course, it was not to be the last or only time.

After I'd married and we'd built the house in Amenia, we got someone's old chicken coop and painted it red. A chicken ramp led up to the little south-facing door, and the leghorns ranged all over the newly cleared land, bright white against the spring green, a lovely peaceful sight. But my one-and-a-half year old son was just the right height to be a challenge for the rooster who one day as we watched in horror fiercely fluffed his feathers, jumped high in the air, spurred Alec in the face and crowed triumphantly at the blood he'd drawn. It was his last crow. We tried to eat that Leghorn, but it took a lot of chewing. Even after we ground him up as rooster-burger he was tough.

"Gregory spoke softly to her in their native tongue."

End of a Peaceable Kingdom

So when I found myself with a yard in California that already had a pony and a goat and needed chickens I avoided Leghorns. I ordered the Brown Egg Special from the Murray McMurray Hatchery in Iowa, and got one "Free Exotic Rare" thrown in. This turned out to be Oscar, the Silver Spangled Hamburg who liked leaping up and fighting his own image in the mirror that happened to be leaning against the side of the house. He didn't attack kids. California in those days seemed to encourage Free Exotic Rares who made love not war.

It was a peaceable kingdom, the chickens in their coop under the willow where the children had their tree house (no pigs hanging here), and over in the field by the creek Goatly the wether and Coco the pony--but one day I decided to move to what everyone there called Backeast and I knew I'd have to kill those chickens. I found homes for Goatly and Coco, but no-one wanted old chickens most of whom had dry vents, their laying years behind them. The time came.

When I was quite alone, I started out for the hen house. I'd given them fresh scraps that morning, and had made a kind of half-assed apology to them for what I was about to do. I caught the first chicken and held her by the legs upside down. As I walked towards the chopping block behind the house, away from witnesses, I swung her around in a way that I had been told would disorient and bedaze her. The swinging did stop her squawking, but then came the hardest part, both psychologically and acrobatically. I picked up the sharpened hatchet, flopped the hen down on the block fast, tried to avoid her beady brown eye, and whacked off her head.

The eye glared, the head fell, the blood ran, the body jerked in my shaking hand. I was giddy and trembling but I continued my work. I had somehow decided that I should hang the chickens on the clotheslines already prepared with loops of string tied at intervals; I strung her up tight by the ankles (if chickens have ankles). "Ankles!" I said to myself, "This is no time to wonder about whether chickens have ankles. And what you've just hung on that line isn't a HER any longer; it's a dead body." Ah, but it sure didn't seem dead; it flapped and bobbed and bled and tried to get loose as I walked, (trying not to run), for the next victim in the coop.

It took about an hour to do them all in. It became increasingly difficult to string up the bodies on the jerking lines. The last hen was of course the hardest (to kill), but there was peace at the last. I was glad I had worn my slicker.

Backeast

Backeast, in Cornwall, I turned happily once again to the offerings of the Murray McMurray Hatchery. There they all were, my old friends of the Brown Egg Special and the Silver Spangled Hamburg. I placed a rather schizophrenic order: six each of those old standbys, Rhode Island Reds and Barred Rocks, as well as fourteen bantams of marvelous variety: Black Tailed White Japanese, Black Japanese, B. B. Red Old English Game Hens, Partridge Rocks and White Crested Black Polish.

My neighbor Gregory had participated eagerly in all stages of my enthusiasms. Luckily Gregory was at home when the Post Office called to say loudly, over the background of cheeping, that our chicks had arrived. While I sped down to get them, Gregory prepared the cattle trough and heat lamp we'd agreed would be a good starter coop. Because I had cats, we had decided Gregory's house was safer than mine; indeed, he became most mother hennish when I brought the cheeping box into his living room. The new chicken era had begun.

We lost three chicks that first week, and a fourth seemed to be having a difficult time keeping its balance, but the rest of them thrived and soon they could all go outside where they frolicked on the new green grass and fought over bugs. After a month, however, I realized that Little Trembly, as I had called the unbalanced chick, was barely able to stand, and used to drag herself from water to grain. She was half the size of her peers. I had to kill her. Same old hatchet, different chopping block. A mercy killing. But again I did the deed behind the woodshed, out of sight of others.

On late June afternoons I would visit the coop and find Gregory there, holding the White Crested Black Polish hen in his arms, speaking softly to her in their native tongue. He was also fond of the feisty little B. B. Red English Game Cock. And he rejoiced, like a true mother, in every stage of the chickens' development. He reported the first adolescent cockerel crows, the first tiny pullet eggs.

Disaster

Then disaster struck. One bright morning Gregory was surprised to find the gate open and the chickens already outside--the chickens, that is, minus one. The biggest Barred Rock rooster was gone, leaving only a few black and white feathers fluttering in the grass. Even though the hen house already looked like a little Sing Sing, raccoons had somehow pried the gate open, seized the rooster and eaten him, right there, in front of everyone. Hurt and angry that he hadn't protected his flock better, Gregory set a Havahart trap and waited. One raccoon, then another, took the bait. Three weeks after the first attack, however, we lost a big hen, a Rhode Island Red. We were tied, briefly, two for two.

And then came the cruelest cut of all. Gregory came to my house early that morning. "They got her, my Polish lady." Fantastic visions of retribution and defense blazed fiercely. We thought of digging a moat around the chicken house, ringing it with razor wire, klieg lighting it at night. I took a sleeping bag and spent a few nights in the coop to keep watch. We checked all visitors for nail clippers and shoe explosives. Trapping a third raccoon raised our score and our spirits, but the opposing team got a fourth hen, the mate of the feisty B.B Red Game Cock. So when Gregory found a slow--probably rabid--raccoon on the stone wall by the coop, he was glad to be able to kill it with a shovel, and we were once again tied, four to four.

It was now late summer, and the chickens enjoyed roaming the field below their house during the day, foraging for bugs and grubs and ticks and seeds and wild green things. Some of the bantams even took to roosting outside at night, a practice we tried to discourage for fear of marauders. One hen disappeared for a while, and we worried that she'd been plucked off, but then we discovered her under a roll of hardware cloth, setting on a nest of five eggs. Gregory took her and her clutch to his house, and on Thanksgiving morning he brought a small box in to me (it had once held a coffee mug) and set it on the dining table. "Look," he said. He opened the box and out hopped three baby chicks who bobbed and skidded on the smooth surface.

"Wow! Congratulations! What will you call them."

He thought for a second. "The Three Musketeers--Athos, Porthos and Aramis. And there's another just about to hatch. That would be d'Artagnan."

We thought now that peace had come, that the slaughter of innocent civilians had stopped. But the next attack came from an entirely different direction.

We had seen the hawks swoop low on occasion, but the chickens would scatter into safe invisible places, melting under the trees and bushes. But one day we missed one of the Partridge Rock bantams; we found her later down by the woods, gutted. A week after that, her fellow hen met the same fate; all that was left of her was one leg on the stile, a sad little remnant and accusingly positioned, as if she had been running for help up at the big house. Reluctantly, we decided to keep the chickens inside, at least for a while. We tried to feel as if we had not lost the battle.

Too Many Roosters

If you've been keeping score, you will realize that we now had a flock of five roosters with about twelve hens thrown in. The crowing was almost constant. Mr. Schweter vould not haf approofed. Something had to be done. I placed an ad, "Free to Good Home, Feisty, attractive bantam roosters." No response. I placed a second ad, "Free to Good Home, Feisty attractive bantam pairs." The phone rang. First call was from a man I did not particularly like. I said the chickens were gone. Second call was from a nice old retiree who thought he might like to "go into chickens." I decided he would not be able to take proper care of our fowl. The third caller was an eager young man who already had a variety of animals--bantams, rabbits, a goat--but somehow, my heart was no longer, if in fact it ever had been, in this business. I couldn't let them go. They were my responsibility--so I told him, too, that the chickens were gone.

Then I thought that if I could--as I had frequently threatened to Gregory--get rid of just one, the most boisterous crow-er, the cockadoodler who out-crowed them all, day and night, Little King B. B. Red, the guy who, small though he was, had a whole harem of willing wives, was so feisty he even attacked me (though not Gregory, his true mother)--if I could just do this, there'd be peace in the valley once more. One afternoon when my daughter Cristina was back for the weekend I decided to do it. I got out the hatchet, stuck it in the chopping block, and went to the chicken coop. DAMN it all, Gregory was there.

"I've come for the rooster," I said.

He didn't miss a beat. "How much do you want for him?"

"What would you do with him? You have nowhere to keep him."

"I'd keep him in my house," he replied.

I went out of the coop and up to the porch, miserable. Soon I heard footsteps. My daughter was approaching, the rooster under her arm. "Gregory gave him to me," she said. "He says you should kill him, that of course you are right, you have too many roosters. Here, take him."

I looked at the rooster, his elegant shimmering gold collar of feathers bright against Cristina's black coat. She, the executioner's assistant, stroked him gently. She knew he soon would die. He knew nothing of the sort. His eyes glittered.

I took the rooster and walked towards the chopping block. But I stumbled right by it. I could barely see to cross over the stile. I opened the chicken coop door and tossed him up and out of my arms. He landed in a cloud of dust. His ladies cheered.