Once when I was young we had a felllow help out on the farm. I don’t know where he came from, he just showed up one day covered in dirt, like he’d been walking a long way. Anyway, grandpa gave him some money for helping out with the hay one day, and afterwards he slept in the old trailer in back of the cow field. The next day he showed up and gramps had him water the animals before lunch. Soon he was just kind of there all the time. We called him Bolero, because that’s what we thought his name was at first. He didn’t talk much, but when he did he had a kind of thick accent. Only after several months someone, I guess it was grandma, figured out his real name which was George. Anyway we kept on calling him Bolero, cos we were used to it, and he answered to it, so it worked for everyone.

Like I said, he didn’t talk much, and kept himself to himself, working hard all day, eating with us silently, then retreating to his trailer to sleep. Once I had to go in there. It was a sunday, and we were going to church and grandma wanted Bolero to come. I opened the door after knocking and recieving no reply. Since I figured he would still be sleeping, I poked my head in. Bolero was asleep under the covers, but one of our bantams was perched on his pillow.
Later I asked him if he had realized that the bantam had been on his pillow and he said yeah, the bantam always came in the trailer. He fed it some bread and it didn’t want to leave. It was a kind of scrawny bantam, never seemed to hang out with the other bantams. He thought it probably needed a home.

After that I often noticed the bantam running after Bolero as he sauntered across the field in the evening to his trailer, and it disappered inside with him.
After a few months Bolero left us, saying he had to be going. No one knew where. None of us asked. After he was gone I couldn’t find the bantam. I looked in the trailer. Nothing. I reckon she went with him.

So we had this rooster, right? We named him King, because he was a Polish, and as you may know, Polish have these weird crown-like, pompoms on their heads.  Also he had a kind of regal air, strutting around like Mick Jagger on stage, thrusting his chest forward as roosters are want to do.

This is, I guess, a kind of typical rooster story, because I’ve heard it in some iteration or other several times.  But here’s how this one went down.

At about ten months into King’s life, when he was fully grown and was just beginning to exercise his duties as a rooster, he also became very aggressive towards us. In particular to the kids who were 3 and 5 at the time.

Out of the blue, he would launch himself at them, flapping his wings, achieving lift off for several yards, and projecting his raptor’s claws out in front of him.  The youngest was very scared. The oldest a little less so, and liked to provoke him into a fight, then run away screaming. The youngest once walked about a half mile around the yard to get back to the house in order to avoid “the Kingdom.”

Eventually, we had suffered enough. We had gotten over our affection for him, and he was no longer the cute chick that he had been. One attack too many decided it, and I got my gun.

All I had to hand was a .177 caliber air rifle. Not being a hunting man, since I find anything but killing for subsistence pretty senseless,  I didn’t have a shotgun or rifle. But the air rifle was surely good enough for a Polish bantam.

Cover your eyes if you don’t like violence.

I took aim from about six feet away and shot him in the head. Cold, ain’t it?

He rolled down the bank and then got up again and looked like he was drunk.

 So I reloaded and stalked to within six feet again and fired.  This time there was blood. He flapped and rolled, but was back on his feet.

It took me a third shot into his tiny brain to end it.

The hens were looking confused. “Sure, King was a B*&%$@d, but is he coming for us next?”

After that I plucked and dressed him, and put him in the slow cooker with lots of red wine, potatoes onions and a bunch of spices. He was kind of skinny, but he cooked up real good.

“Is this King?” one of the kids asked.  My wife looked at me.

“Yup.”

“Not bad, is he?”

So, for all of you roosters out there….

Watch it.

One day as I was walking down to the barn I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a kind of visual commotion. Turning my head to figure out what was happening on the track on the side of the barn, I saw a Red Tailed Hawk sitting on one of my chickens.

There is something demonic about the brutal fact of one animal eating another, although of course its completely natural. But it was difficult not to see the otherwise majestic and beautiful hawk as a hideous kind of Harpie, loosed from the bowels of hell, taking not just the chicken’s meat for its survival, but its soul as well, in some sort of Twilight-for-Farm-Animals sort of a way. It was like witnessing a crime in progress, something that should not be witnessed at all.

Realizing that whatever I did would probably be too little too late, I nonetheless swung into action with a series of high-pitched screams. I hurled myself down the bank to the rescue of the hapless bird, and the hawk released its prey and flapped away with a kind of “foiled-again” shrug of his shoulders.

On closer inspection the bird revealed itself to be “Goldie” one of the children’s favorite Aracanas—a particularly golden one. She was not dead, but she was not moving, and her eyes were closed. The attacker had been perched on her back and judging by the blood on her head and coming out of her beak, the hawk had been clawing at her scalp with talons and beak.

As far as I was concerned Goldie was toast. I didn’t really see how anything could get up and walk away from such an experience. I scrambled back up the bank to fetch my gun, figuring that it would be kinder to put her out of her misery rather than let her slowly fade.

I returned two minutes later to the scene of the crime, clutching my gun, but to my surprise Goldie was gone. Had the Harpie returned to claim its lunch, from the tree where it had been watching me? When I looked around I saw something that gave me chills, for some reason. Goldie was hobbling up the bank, making, with a terrifying kind of resolve, for the safety of the coop.

It shouldn’t necessarily have given me the chills, but there was something about the sight of her that suggested Zombie: One minute she was practically dead, blood-besmirched and gaga, then she was back from dead, but not looking quite right.

I had to wonder what kind of creature we were dealing with here; chicken, yet not chicken. One who has been to the other side, and returned, changed in some essential way by her encounter with the thing that wanted to, and very nearly did, eat her.

Soon she had managed to climb the bank to the barn and was staggering like one inebriated, towards its door. I was interested to see how she would navigate the little ladder that led inside, but she hopped right onto it and disappeared.

I went round the barn to enter the coop, half expecting to see her in there devouring the other hens, in a flesh eating poultry moment.  When I opened the door I found the hens on one side of the room eying her suspiciously, and Goldie perched high up on the other side. Clearly they were awed by her initiation into the rights of life and death, her brushing off of the Wings of Death. I was awed by Goldie’s will to survive, her clawing back from the brink of death towards the light.

For a few days she hung out in the coop, not coming out with the other chickens as they foraged. Then eventually she started to venture out. Her wounds had healed, the bloody, wet spot on her head and side had dried up and her feathers had almost regained their lustre which justified her name. Within a couple of weeks she seemed to have regained control of things to be allowed back into the flock, although she was always a bit quicker to start at a strange sound, or flee for cover at the suggestion of a wheeling vulture in the sky.

And I always kept a respectful distance from her. Or should I say IT, for I never quite saw Goldie in the same light again.

Notwithstanding some of the stories around here, this one is actually true. Apparently. It concerns the curious case of Mike, the headless chicken.

On September 10, 1945 Loyd Olsen of Fruita, CO, went to the chicken coop to harvest a rooster for dinner. He chose Mike, a young Wyandotte. Unfortunately, his decapitation skills left something to be desired, and instead of killing him, he removed everything except one ear and most of the brain stem. From the evidence it seems that his head was still partially attached to his body. But not by much.

Mr. Olsen took it upon himself to continue to care for Mike, having failed to kill him. He seemed able to perch, make a kind of gargling sound, and, using a syringe and an eyedropper, he could imbibe liquid and small grains of corn.

Much of his spare time was spent “pecking” for food with his neck.

The strangest part of the story is that Mike, with his new found talents, soon began touring the country. His lease of life was not that short lived, and he managed, between his beheading and his eventual death some 18 months later, to gain five pounds.

He made the cover of Time, and Life magazines, as he toured in side shows along  with such companions as a two-headed cow.  At the height of his fame he was valued at $10,000. A wave of copy-cat beheadings swept the nation. None, however, managed to live more than a day or two.

In the spring of 1947, as the world was recovering from the war, Mike, on tour in Phoenix, succumbed to a choking fit. The Olsens had forgotten their anti-choking kit, and the Guiness Book of Records reported that his severed trachea could not take in sufficient air to survive.

How could all this have happened? Well, the Olsen axe had missed the carotid artery and a clot had prevented him from bleeding to death.  His brain stem being left largely undamaged, all the survival functions were available to Mike (breathing, heart rate, etc).

To this day, in Fruita, Colorado, Mike the headless chicken is remembered, memorialized really, on the third weekend of May which is Mike the Headless Chicken Day. Activities during the festivities include 5K Run Like a Headless Chicken Race, egg toss, and Pin the Head on the Chicken.

A Story of love, sex, death, and nocturnal, beastly raids.

The Black Frizzle Cochin is a bantam, smaller than most chickens, and with the unique distinction of having feathers which curve outwards giving the impression, as our hatchery brochure put it, that it had “walked backwards through a windstorm.”

We bought two of these birds one year, and as they were added to a mixed run, we did not know the sex. In the brooder, they were much smaller than the Aracanas and Wyandottes that we bought to be our egg-laying vanguard. They were smaller, too, than the pompom-headed Silver Polish we bought for kicks. But their feathers were normal, and apparently not destined to exhibit their frizzle until they were adult.

Which happened quickly enough. They both blossomed into full-fledged Frizzles, one male, and one female. Both behaved completely to type, the rooster taking control of the mini flock, which consisted of “Mrs.” Frizzle and the two Silver Polish (the egg-layers were too big for them to hang out with, although from time to time the rooster would “stray” into their territory and there would be a flurry of feathers and squawking as Mr. Frizzle tried his luck with one of the bigger hens.)

But as is the case with most roosters, his behavior left a lot to be desired. Mrs Frizzle was the only chickeny thing around that was small enough for him to have his way with. Consequently he was on her a lot. Her feathers could not withstand this constant assault and after a few months there were not many of them left. This made Mr. Frizzle out to be a kind of abusive lover, reducing his partner to a bedraggled sex-slave. In addition to his behavior towards his missus, he also had the roosterly habit of attacking people—jumping up at your leg and scratching with his talons. Luckily his size and weight made this comic—unless you were a small child in which case it was diabolical and terrifying. I often caught him running at me from behind, but when I turned and took a step towards him he would stop in his tracks and do a little dance, as if trying to get a grip on his instinct to let fly at me.

Mr. Frizzle puts on a display of power atop a stump

But notwithstanding these distinct deficits, the children were enchanted by him because he exhibited so much personality. When we threw corn for them, Mr. Frizzle would pick a piece up in his beak and cluck, so that before eating anything himself, Mrs. Frizzle and the Silver Polishes would come running and begin to feast. This was an extraordinary display of instincts which was very easy to humanize—a kind of “ladies first” approach that was hard-wired. And it made us feel that even though he was rough on Mrs. Frizzle, there was, indeed, some community among these chickens, that they had a very well defined and understood social code, and it is the possession of such a code that raises animals—in our human perception—above the level of insensate beasts.

As in so many chicken stories, this one involves death, so be warned. The first of these was that of one of the Polish. We had just moved their coop to the orchard in spring, from the barn where they had overwintered.

That first night I got to them just after dark, having put the kids to bed, and I was already too late. I found Polish on the driveway, half eaten. A skunk was prowling in the bushes. I can only think that because of her pompom, she would not have seen the skunk coming, that is why such a slow moving creature could have caught her.

This left Mr. and Mrs. Frizzle, and the one remaining Polish, known as both of them were, as Polly. It was several weeks later, well into summer that real disaster struck. The little coop in which we kept the four of them had a back door with faulty hinges. Early one morning I heard Frizzle crowing, which was normal, but it was coming from outside the front door, not in the orchard where their coop was. This meant that he was out, and the coop must have been open all night. He was obviously alive, but how about Mrs. Frizzle and Polly?

In the orchard I discovered a grisly scene: the wooden board which carried the bottom hinge had split in two, and the door had fallen open. There was no sign of Mrs. Frizzle, and a trail of black and white feathers led to Polly in the bushes, eaten beyond recognition. I stood staring at her for a while, appalled by the gruesomeness of the spectacle (it was like a crime scene, where a brutal murder had taken place), and tried to imagine what her last minutes had been like and how much she must had suffered while the creature ate at her innards.

You look, at times like these, for signs that animals are “grieving,” or suffering in some way that you might relate to as humans. Frizzle didn’t do anything that really brought this to mind, despite the fact that he must have had an unimaginably traumatic night. He looked at me with an inscrutable expression that made me wonder whether humans were ever so unfeeling, perhaps back when life was always nasty, brutish and short, back when we were always a hair’s breadth away from death, and life was cheap.

But when we threw corn for Mr. Frizzle, pathetically, and as if to highlight his loss, he held some in his beak and clucked, as if his ladies were coming, showing I suppose, that this act to which we had attributed so much meaning and which had to some extent redeemed him as a husband was, after all, a dumb instinctual prompt, activated whether or not there was anyone for whom to provide.

For a while Frizzle was alone in his small coop. His plight—robbed of his lover and companions, and alone—possessed a certain existential horror, and we couldn’t stand it for long, listening to his pointless clucking, his vain calling of womenfolk, and we found a mate for him. She was a white Frizzle, and complimented him well. For a few weeks life was good for the Frizzles. Then inexplicably, she was gone, taken, one can only presume, in the daylight, which was unusual in our experience. Mr. Frizzle was destined, for the time being, to live out his days loveless. For some time he stalked the yard, which was shared by a bunch of much larger Wyandottes, hardly the same species, really. Nonetheless we often saw them racing across the yard, followed closely by a sprinting Frizzle, who, no matter how hard he ran, could never quite make contact with them.

Mr. & Mrs. Frizzle

Then early in the fall we went away for a couple of nights, asking a neighbor to let the chickens in and out. When we came back Frizzle was gone. One can only imagine his final moments. Perhaps he had been staking out the big ladies, from the shade of one of the fur trees, when a fisher cat came out of the gully and grabbed him. Or he might have been racing across the lawn to throw himself at a hen when a chicken hawk descended from the skies. Either way, he had vanished without a trace, and with him, the last of our cochin friends had died.

.

This may indeed seem like a kind of holocaust of a chicken story. And it makes me think that we were too laissez-faire in our protection of the Frizzles and Polishes. After that we were considerably more careful with our egg laying Wyandottes and seemed for the time being to fend off any more bloodshed. Without us, their gaolers and protectors, they seem as a species to have lost all natural ability to protect themselves from all predators.