Treed By A Rooster Part 4

The Big Ax

I yelled at her, “You have to hit him hard, Dummy!” She yelled at me, “This is the little ax, Dummy; the big one’s sitting right there, why didn’t you get that one?” To which I yelled back, “Well fine, give me the big one then, and I’ll do it if you’re that scared of him!” So we switched places and I picked up The Big Ax. I raised the thing over my head, and discovered it was a lot heavier than I had expected.

When Gram came home, there stood two beaming girls, both splattered in red, presenting her with approximately half a chicken. “You girls killed him all by yourselves?!!!”  We proudly nodded, grinning ear to ear. She took him from us, and held the body over the sink to finish draining while we told her the first part of the story. She looked at us strangely, then said, “I just took the ax in to get it sharpened. What did you use?” Sister showed her the Little Ax we had started with, and Gram stared at us in amazement. “Girls,” she said, “That blade couldn’t cut through butter. Do you see how rusty it is? How did you manage to kill him with it?” We knew by her tone that we must have done something wrong, but we weren’t sure what it was, because the proof that our method worked was lying in the sink.

 So, thinking we would redeem ourselves, we told her the second part of the story, and she demanded to see The Big Ax.  When she saw what we brought in, she collapsed into hysterical giggles, which we couldn’t understand. But then again, Gram laughed about just about everything we did, so we just chalked this up to more adult weirdness.

She finally wiped her eyes and said to me, “Honey, this is a slitting maul; this is what I use to cut firewood with. It’s a wonder you didn’t chop your sister’s hand off.”    Oh.

Treed By A Rooster Part 3

The Final Revenge

Charley was of a good breeding stock, and all his chicks came out large and healthy. Gram needed all the financial help she could get, and the sale of meat and eggs that Charley produced helped tremendously. But when he started chasing the ten-year-old, Gram decided it was time for Sunday dinner. Sister and I thought we’d gain some long overdue brownie points, along with getting rid of our old nemesis, by presenting her with the uncooked entree. So, we waited until Gram went to do her Saturday shopping, then grabbed the ax out of the barn.

We’d watched Gram kill chickens several times and, it had looked easy; you just snuck up behind them when they were sleeping and grabbed their feet. Then you hooked their head between two nails that were pounded into a stump, and chopped.

Because I was stronger than Sister, we thought it best that I do the grabbing, and she do the chopping. What I forgot to find out about, until it was too late, was how to control the wildly flapping wings in my face. In the chaos that followed, Charley ended up upside-down. This took care of the wing problem, but now his claws were ripping open my hands, so I yelled at her. “He’s scratching me! He’s tearing open my hand! What do I do?!!” She screamed back at me, “Get him to the stump! Get his head on the stump!”

Between the two of us, we did somehow managed to get his head wedged between the two nails, and she grabbed the ax. The problem was, we’d gotten him in sideways, and Charley was looking up at her with one eye. I think she lost her nerve then, and rather half-heartedly let the ax drop. It hit Charley’s shoulder and scared him, but didn’t do anything.

Treed By A Rooster Part 2

Outsmarted Charley

When I told her the story, smirking about how I had outsmarted Charley, Gram pointed out to me that roosters can fly into trees. Fortunately for me, Charley apparently hadn’t thought of that either. He was content to strut up and down in front of my escape route, and when he was satisfied he was still top chicken, slowly swaggered back toward his domain.

By that time, I was cold, hungry and humiliated that I had been treed by a rooster. So, I climbed down and grabbed a white shirt off the clothesline, then  ran at him, yelling and brandishing my weapon of deadly force. He was so shocked that the quivering mass of human he’d just taught a lesson to was counterattacking, he lost his head and ran toward the one place, I suppose, he felt was safe. In his panic, though, he miscalculated the width of the henhouse doorway, and caught his wing on his way through. He flipped head over heals, rolled all the way across the floor, and finally landed on his back next to a hen’s nest. Still terror-stricken when I came in waving my shirt, he fluttered himself upright, and cowered behind one of his hens. 

Treed By A Rooster Part 1

A Lousy Day

Articulating and thinking through the goals I want to accomplish this year is taking longer than I thought it would, so I’m going to tell you the story of Charley so you’ll have something to enjoy while I finish  this next series. Fair warning; you might not want to read this if you don’t like reading about animals being killed. 

It had been a lousy day in early spring. My Sister and I had spent the morning cleaning out the chicken coop, and so we stunk, and spent the afternoon stacking the last of the firewood, so we were horribly sore. Not to mention it was cold, wet and windy. As I said, it was a lousy day, and not quite over. She still had to clean out the horse barn, and I was grumpily taking the laundry off the line, when I heard Charley behind me. Most roosters are pretty benign unless they think their hens are being threatened, but Charley was just plain mean. He liked to fly feet first at his victim’s face. He had gashed the dogs several times for simply walking among his harem.

Well his girls had mindlessly gathered all around me, busily looking for tidbits in the grass, and he was getting himself all fluffed up, and challenging me loudly. Gram always told us that if we stand our ground against an animal, they most likely wouldn’t attack. But I was only about ten, and Charley looked mighty big and threatening to me. So I did the only thing that seemed reasonable; I looked for an escape route. I didn’t think I could make the outhouse in time, but the wood pile next to the pine tree was right behind me, and I was pretty positive that roosters couldn’t climb.  So I ran up the pile and sat in the lowest branch.