Saturday, October 9, 2010

Today I removed a dead chicken from the chicken house;

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:

Ruth said...

good choice

Jenne' Andrews said...

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

Dawn Potter said...

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.