which is a euphemistic way of saying that I scooped up her corpse with a horse fork, dropped it into a five-gallon joint compound bucket, locked the ghoulish poodle into the house, carried the bucket into the woods, and emptied the contents into a heap of brown bracken and red leaves;
which is a crass way of saying that my oldest hen, Wild Thing, who once was the toughest chicken alive, the rare hen who managed survive for a week in the predator-laden November woods, has gone to meet the Great Fox in the Sky;
which is a sentimental way of saying that an elderly, molting araucana died a quiet death under the grain feeder and that her body will now go some way toward keeping a few fox pups alive.
Anyway, this is how I've spent my morning so far. Maybe, in Wild Thing's honor, I will dig out E. B. White's essay "The Death of a Pig." He, too, had a ghoulish dog.
3 comments:
good choice
This is wonderful, as is the case with many of your entries, in the sense of seeming like little gems that should be collected into a volume of their own...xj
Thanks, Jenne. And here I was thinking I'd just be alienating readers with a dead-chicken post. It's hard to imagine that many people want to read about throwing a hen corpse into the woods. I'm glad you were one of them.
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