ESTESBOG

BY PETER WALKER

Let’s face it. Chickens are not smart. Inside that small, silly-looking head is a brain about the size of a garbanzo bean. That’s not much to work with. 

Still, insofar as a hen can cluck while at the same time walking from Point A to Point B, chickens are capable of rudimentary multitasking.

 Now, if you want to really cripple the intellectual abilities of a chicken’s brain, add about a half cup of testosterone. I grew up in the country. In my younger days I dressed out many a chicken. I can attest to the fact that a rooster’s gonads are many, many times the size of its brain. You know what that phenomenon does to the behavior of teenage boys. Just imagine its effects on a chicken! Whereas a normal chicken brain might broadcast the signal, “Worm ahead. Eat it.” – a testosterone-soaked rooster brain is more likely to consider whether to pick a fight with said worm or make love to it. 

Unfortunately, in the mental gymnastics of rooster thinking, there is inability to inject the concept of size or probability into the equation. To a rooster, a grizzly bear looks pretty much like a pigeon. It’s his job to run both of them off, then go receive thanks and maybe a little nik-nik from the pullets. 

As a 5-year-old, I am not sure whether I was physically intimidated by the alpha White Leghorn rooster in my Dad’s flock so much as I was creeped out by the blank, reptilian look in its eyes. Whether from a rooster or a snapping turtle or a playground bully or a politician, I’ve always gotten the willies from that look. At any rate, I had no desire to tangle with the white rooster. 

Since it was my job to feed and water the flock and collect the eggs, I needed a strategy to avoid confrontation. My mother always saved uneaten toast, bread heels, and salad scraps in a bowl for the chickens. I would take those out to the henhouse and toss them through the fence into the outdoor pen, then imitate the sound the rooster made when he was trying to impress the hens with his chivalry. The hens would pour out into the yard with the rooster right behind them. While they feasted, I’d slip into the henhouse and drop the gate to bar their return. 

Twenty odd years earlier my own father was not as fortunate. The tyrant rooster in his world was allowed to roam the grounds at will and thus was an ever-present threat. One day while walking through the main room of the barn old beady eyes ambushed the 5-year-old from a side entrance. There was no place for the boy to run except in circles all the time yelling for help with the big, fluffed-up rooster close on his heels in hot pursuit. 

As it happened, help was not long in coming. Dad’s 6-years-older brother, Bob, was tending the cows in the stanchions in a side room and could hear the commotion. The older boy arrived on-scene carrying a three-prong pitchfork. He waited for his younger brother to pass, and then flung the pitchfork at the big rooster. The long steel tines almost missed entirely, but one pierced the webbing between the base of one wing and the outer joint then stuck firmly in the gray boards of the barn wall pinning the indignant chicken so that its toes did not quite touch the floor. 

That is quite of lot of indignity for one rooster to suffer. But it paled to what came next. Before the pitchfork was pulled from the wall, the mop-headed little kid whom the big bird so enjoyed tormenting was allowed by the bigger human to get in a few retributive slaps and kicks while the big bird hung squawking helplessly. 

That rooster did not learn any permanent lesson. (There is only so much memory in half a dozen neurons.) Instead he became increasingly brazen, now attacking my grandmother as well as all three boys whenever their backs were turned. When my grandmother joined the chorus of lobbyists for the rooster’s demise, it probably meant the end was near anyway. But the old bird had yet to commit the ultimate blunder. 

Grampa Walker was a very large man for his time. He kept a watering trough filled beneath the barn during times when the brook ran dry in late summer. He came home one evening and filled two pails of water to carry down to the stock trough. Getting there involved crossing in front of the barn door, then descending a little hill and circling around to the open underside of the barn. 

My grandmother described how, as Grampa passed the big front door of the barn, the rooster’s head craned out from inside and watched the big man go by with hands full. As the bald head disappeared beneath the crest of the hill, the rooster’s hackles went erect and the bird lit out on his tail. 

Five minutes later Grampa came back up the hill into view. In one hand were the two empty pails. The other held the leg of a large, limp chicken carcass. The old bird finally went too far. The reign of terror was over.

When I was about 12 or 13, a family by the name of Kelly lived in the old Mills farm about a mile further up White Oak Hill from where I lived in southwestern Maine.  I used to mow their huge lawn and, when they were away, I took care of their pets and stock. One day at the beginning of a two-week period when the Kellys would be out of town, I carried a partial sack of laying mash into the chicken pen on the second floor of their huge barn. The flock consisted of about 30 black laying hens (brown eggs) and a single, enormous barred gray roosted with 2-inch long spurs that almost could have doubled for tent stakes.

 As I bent over the long wooden trough to spread out the feed, I completely dropped my guard. From behind I was rammed as if by one of the linemen on the Broncos’ offensive line. But that was nothing compared to the pain of the rooster’s spurs jabbing into both sides of one of my calves. I had been violated!

 Without pausing to think, I looked at the unfinished wall ahead of me. There, leaning between two studs as if deliberately set out for me, was a 30” piece of half-inch copper pipe. In a rage I grabbed the pipe, turned on the rooster, and swung for the fence. The giant rooster was laid out flopping on the floor, apparently in his death throes.

But I could not celebrate my successful revenge for even a millisecond. Icy fingers of reality gripped me instead. Okay, tough guy, now what are you going to do? You’ve just cruelly killed someone else’s rooster. How are you going to explain that? 

I avoided coming to terms with it for a little while by leaving the twitching carcass where it lay and going outside to mow the lawn. As I pushed the lawnmower around I first mentally beat myself up for giving in to my temper, then began to sort things out and make a plan.

 I could not commit the double sin of letting the huge chicken go to waste. I needed to dress it out and put it in the Kellys’ freezer. Then I would just have to face the music and confess my sins first to my folks, then to the Kelly family.

 I put the lawnmower away and went into the house (I had a key) and found a sharp knife and a couple of large plastic bags. I climbed the barn stairs and entered the hen pen to retrieve my victim.

 But he wasn’t there! Instead, sticking up from deep within the crowd of cowering hens along the back wall was a rooster’s head bent off to one side at about 45 degrees. On it’s neck was a baseball-sized hematoma. The eye on that side was swollen shut, but the rooster was conscious and semi-functional. It didn’t look like he was going to make it; but there was hope.

 Every day for the next two weeks the bulge on the rooster’s neck grew smaller. His swollen eye reopened after about a week and, by the time the Kelly family returned from their vacation, the old bird could nearly hold his head erect again.

 So, in a way, I got away with it. I never told anyone about the incident until many years later. But to this day, whenever I lose my temper – which is less and less as I get older, I remind myself of what I did to that poor rooster and what a senseless act a temper tantrum is.