Lambsquarters (27 page)

As they strutted around their winter residence with its flooded floor, their feet gathered balls of hardened
guano, big as eggs. Clogs. The chickens could step dance. Each day they were more heavily shod, higher booted, platformed, pattened and stilettoed. Some feet looked tidy as riding boots, others messy, laces dragging, tongues hanging out. The latter being the sort of chicken who would carry its wallet on a chain from belt loop to pocket. These chickens clicked when they walked with their tap shoes and beat out a tattoo in the nesting box, an ostinato.

The clogged feet might have been a trick, like prisoners feigning disease. Or a decoy setting me up for a surprise. A Trojan horse. I tried to ignore their clunking claws. I waited for the warming window sun to bake their boots off, for the waters to part, for someone to fix the leak, for a miracle. I shamefully put off dealing with the megafeet until it approached cruelty to poultry. Finally I was compelled to take action.

My daughter, though she is not a hen lover, pitched in and helped me catch them and perfect pullet podiatry. We grimly gathered our tools: secateurs and penknives, screwdrivers and scissors. The day was warm, with the promise of summer, the threat of languor, the possibility of malaria breeding in that swampy floor. The hens needed the cooling breezes of the coast, the dry security of an outdoor run.

There is no literature on chicken pedicures. Debeaking, caponizing, sexing, inseminating, banding, plucking, roasting and fricasseeing all have their
established techniques. Chicken housing and raising and butchering can be learned from books. Even chicken glasses are in the literature: putting little redlensed spectacles over their eyeballs will stop cannibalism. You can read up on that. But not foot problems. Chickens aren’t generally caught in floods (unlike turkeys, which are legendary for not coming in out of the rain). They high-step and strut. And scratch.

Chickens are usually fed from hoppers that are raised to beak level and filled from above. The feed elevated from the floor mess stays clean, dry, wholesome. But chickens love ground food. They’d rather scratch the dirt, peck a piece of cracked corn, scratch some more, uncover a bit of barley, turn around, bend from the wishbone, tail in the air, and scratch—left-right-left, peck a piece, right-left-right. Barn hens, even those running loose, get few pecking chances. Cement is adamantine. It just doesn’t yield to the debeaked bill, doesn’t conceal or cover grains and fibres. Outside hens pick a scratch patch and attack it the way cedar waxwings strip a currant bush. They strut and scratch, bend and turn, peck and nod until every speck of food is gone.

As a child I had a chicken toy, a pecking toy, coloured red and yellow and apple green. It was made of wood and string and had a red-handled square paddle. At each corner stood a little yellow hen and underneath were four separate strings, which met at a red ball hanging below. If I started the ball swinging, the chickens
would bob and peck at the paddle, painted green as grass, and alternately connect their beaks with the yolk-coloured specks of grain. I spent hours feeding those hens, preparing for my undisclosed farming future. But they didn’t have feet. They were pegged to the board, to the strings. No scratching; no chiropody.

But these birds are real. Their feet were as rock-hard as a gangster’s on his last trip down the river. With our mining tools ready, we stuffed a bird headfirst into an old boot to hold her still, contain her beak and wings, so that we could gain access to her feet. The first hen was very badly off. She’d met with some string, caught it around both feet, pulled and pulled until it was noose-tight and she wound up hobbled. Two toes were so badly covered with muck they were stuck together. I cut them a little too close, adding to the confusion and mess. But my anaesthetist bravely stuck it out—two women running the farm—it had to be done.

The boot made a poor container. It held the bird, but she couldn’t breathe properly, was terrified, claustrophobic perhaps, compressed. So we improvised with the chicken catcher—a piece of number nine wire, the farmer’s friend, with a catching loop at one end and a hanging hook at the other. After snagging a bird around the ankle (do chickens have ankles?) we hung her from the rafters, upside down, wings awry, beak on a dangle, feet up and exposed, ready for the clippers. We could have used a jackhammer.

One by one the chickens emerged clean-toed and ready for their new pen. We worked together, my daughter and I, to convert the old outhouse by the drive-shed into a chicken hut with straw, a roost, a laying box and a fenced yard. Small, but attractive. We used chicken wire, tent pegs (for my girl is a master camper, an ingenious builder, a brilliant strategist), an old metal pole as a post, popped into the ground with the sledgehammer fuelled by strong teenaged muscles bronzed by summer sun.

The sheep worried the fence and the chickens got out. The sheep got in. The new pup, Sydney, an Australian shepherd desperate to work, caught the chickens, one by one, and held them down until one or the other of us, called by the indignant squawking of the hens, came and made the release. The chickens were ruffled and somewhat defeathered, but fine.

We needed reinforcements. We dragged extra wooden hurdles over from the stable and pounded in stronger posts. We diverted the sheep to a distant field, and now the chickens are settling in. They’re laying again, growing new feathers after their moult, redefining their pecking order. The hobbled chicken is alone in the old pen; she was cannibalized so badly there was a hole the size of a quarter in her back, pooled with blood. I dared not let her out. But she too is better. With the water turned off, the floor is dry. I just give her a drink in an old bread pan, a little feed each day,
and now she is back on her lay. Two eggs in the past two days. And feathers have grown on her back, camouflaging, if not healing, the wound. At first they were just quills, like a porcupine’s, clear and thick and thorny, but then the shafts grew fuzz on the ends, like the soft edges of fine paper on a closed fan. Now the feathers are like velvet chestnut-coloured scales layering down her back. Rudimentary, but beautiful. She struts, she clucks, she lays. And soon, I hope, she will be able to join her mates, hold her own, find her place and still survive. And soon, I hope, we will clean out her pen, fix the leak and redecorate the winter residence. We’ll remove the holland cloths, dust off the pictures, add fresh flowers. The chickens will be able to walk across the barnyard, scratching as they go, and strut into the warm dry land of Cairo for the winter. They will bed down in golden straw ripened by Ra himself.

HECTOR

NOW THAT THE DOMESTIC
birds are debrogued, debooted, unlaced and running footloose through the long grass, my eyes turn to the wild fowl once again. All started well this year. The bluebirds, who succeeded with a late nesting last summer, arrived together, paired. They scouted, preened, surveyed, tested one box and another, then departed in a storm. It was a late spring, the latest I could ever remember. They retreated for a couple of weeks to warmer winds, where they could forage, rest, exchange billets-doux.

When they returned they seemed dubious of the renovated box, which was stately on its post and subdued in its grey PVC pest-protector. Though nothing was going to shinny up and attack this year’s fledglings, the would-be parents were not co-operating. Were not moving in.

Twice I emptied the box of tree swallow bedding. The
invaders, beautiful in their shimmering deep-green Italian suits with stark white shirt fronts, are dive-bombers. They frequently argue about property rights. I am prepared to share; they clearly are not. So I discourage them as neighbours. They build extravagant nests, works of art piled with large feathers like eighteenth-century court chapeaux. Tree swallows are classy in their iridescent formal dress, but a bit overstated, meretricious.

Bluebirds, while breathtakingly beautiful and stunningly bright, balance visual display with a sweet demeanour, a gentle reserve, a commitment to collaboration and communal living. They share. But not with tree swallows. Instead of fighting, my cerulean pair retreated to a distant box on the fencerow, down the sheep lane, past the Alexandrian chicken coop, the drive-shed and the old log house. I checked the box one day, seeing the bluebirds nearby, and found the nest crafted. The next time I looked there were three perfect blue eggs, and the time after that there were five. Birds don’t sit until their clutch is complete. The eggs remain dormant until the female begins incubation. Then the eggs develop together. She laid. She sat. They hatched.

I wasn’t able to observe as much in this location— which might have been their plan—of the nuance of the courtship, the gestation support, the offerings of bugs and tasty morsels, the recognition of cravings and ravings as they prepared for parenthood. I was vigilant in my concern though, for now they were once again in a
perilous situation atop a cedar fence post, which was rough, climbable.

I planned their protection from intruders. My children’s outgrown sled, a round plastic saucer in an unnameable neon hue, lay discarded in the drive shed. With my secateurs I cut to the saucer’s centre and snipped out a circle. I arranged the garish collar around the post under the box, where it became a plastic ceiling to climbers, slitherers, shinniers. I willed the bluebirds to overlook the aesthetic insult, recognize the thought and stay and raise a family. The collar screamed bad taste, outshone the bursting buds, competed with the lilacs for attention, dwarfed spring flowers, clashed with everything. But the birds stayed, accepted my gaudy assistance and got on with it.

During my ramblings I marked their progress, checked the nest, noted the growth of the nestlings. I always knocked on the door, but the female never flew out the hole; either I timed my checks with her wanderings or she fled when I opened the box, narrowly missing me in her reluctant exit. There were at least four babies, possibly five; I never stayed long enough to be sure.

Just when they were getting big enough to plan their futures, go for their first solo flights, a time when their nutritional needs were demanding, almost constant, the male bluebird discovered an enemy.

Neither cat nor hawk, this foe was of his own image. Leaving his perch in the maple tree, he
approached the glass of my loft window, veered away, and approached again. At times he landed on the window frame, sneaked peeks inside from the corner of his eye. Sidelong glances. He puffed out, made himself big and blue and mean. His double did the same. They played at this game, ruffling, sneering, threatening, for most of the morning. If I stood right against the window, he would fly off to the safety of the tree, but as soon as I settled even a short distance away, he was back at it, flopping himself against the glass, menacing his reflection, looking formidable.

Obscure the glass, I thought. He will never see himself through glass darkly. So I taped up curtains made from scraps of fabric, a weaving apron, newspaper. I obliterated the whole window—my well-earned spring light gone—to save him from himself. But to no avail. This bird could see only the outer reflection, and no amount of screening or reasoning would persuade him to call a truce.