Letters from an Oregon Ranch/Chapter 12
XII
My recent valuable experience with poultry having taught me how to wrestle successfully with an egg famine, I next proceeded to the more complex and at the same time more interesting problems of hatching and raising young chickens. After our appetite for eggs had been appeased, it seemed high time that some of those hens should be getting down to business in another fashion. It was late in the season; the early Spring flowers had bloomed and faded; orchard trees were blossoming, birds singing and nest-building; and here were our feathered folk, wandering over hill and dale, chasing yellow butterflies and young grasshoppers, scratching up earthworms and garden seeds with cheerful zeal, talking and gossiping among themselves, evidently so in love with sunshine and freedom that not one of them had the slightest notion of going into solitary confinement for three long, stupid weeks. It seemed just possible that they belonged to some biddies’ club, were “new-era” dames, and had permanently retired from the hatching business; perhaps they were saying to each other, “If these carnivorous people want Spring chickens, let them buy an incubator and hatch them. Let none look to us for early broilers,—we are emancipated females.”
One day I was out raking the yard when Tom, coming up the walk, said: “Brace yourself for painful news. This very day two hens belonging to those shameless Stanhopes were set—or sat—which would you say?
Two fowls, dusting themselves under a rose-bush near us, apparently overheard this talk; one of them sprang up and really did seem to say, quite sharply, “What’s that?”
“I said, madam,” answered Tom, “that the Stanhopes have two hens set; and I ask, ‘Why stand ye here all the day idle?’ You are a Plymouth dame, and should have the Plymouth conscience.”
This speech aroused the ire of the recumbent Susan Nipper, who scrambled to her feet and began a furious scratching, indignantly hurling dead leaves and gravel toward the speaker, who said in retaliation, “As for you, Mistress Nipper, the guillotine will get you if you don’t watch out!”
Whether or not our hens were influenced by this talk will probably never be definitely known, but a couple of weeks later the sitting craze broke out among them, raging as fiercely as the Egyptian plague. Clucking hens were everywhere, some sitting in the most ludicrous places, others in their proper boxes, often two and sometimes even three on the same nest. The non-sitters persisted in depositing their eggs with the sitters, which resulted in noisy vituperations, with scratchings from sharp claws and jabbings from vicious beaks. At this the chanticleers, under pretence of stilling the tempest, but secretly glad of the racket and of the chance to show off their oratorical gifts, would begin a terrific harangue, which often terminated in a combat between themselves. The tumult and confusion were like a madhouse.
Meanwhile the demand for eggs grew strenuous. We could not get half enough to supply the emergency call. Everywhere were hens sitting on nothing. One in the woodhouse, with imbecile credulity, was placidly brooding a broken doorknob. I have often heard the remark, “No more sense than a sitting hen;” now I see the force of it. Out of pity for their needs, I urged Tom to “take to the hills” for supplies. Busy with other work, he was not eager for such an outing.
“But, Tom,” I insisted, “my prophetic soul warns me that this is the tide in our affairs, which taken at the flood will lead on to fortune.”
“And my prophetic soul warns me that you are a false Cassandra and a persistent one; but if you will bring me that detestable basket, I’ll go and see what I can do.”
Soon I had the satisfaction of seeing him jog away on his quiet old Rozinante, in quest of the golden nest-eggs of our future fortune. Returning about dark with a full basket, obtained with difficulty from various sources, he hastened to visit the home of each feathered recluse and furnish it with supplies; after which this good Samaritan sank in exhaustion upon a convenient log, and, fanning himself with his hat, declared that he could have passed through the horrors of the French Revolution with less physical and mental wear and tear than he had suffered with this siege of “settin’ hens.”
I sometimes think Thomas is given to exaggeration, especially when fatigued.
This was only the beginning of trouble. Two obstinate hens were holding the fort in one barrel; neither would give up. With great sagacity, as I thought, I advised putting another barrel there with a nest in it, and the removal of Miss Flite thereto. “You know her brain is a little muddled,” I added, “and she won’t know one barrel from the other.”
“Don’t fool yourself!” was the ominous reply, as my plans were being executed.
The next morning he came in, saying, “Just as I expected! both those hens are again on the same nest.”
After due deliberation, the oracle thought it quite probable that Miss Flite was the original owner of the nest, and was holding it by right of discovery.
“Why not try Mrs. Pardiggle on the others?”
“It’s no use, she won’t stay; but I’ll chuck her in.”
And he was right; she would have none of it, but flounced out in high dudgeon as often as put in. Tom then fell back on “common sense” and his mythical experience at “Uncle Jim’s,” placing a partition in the barrel with a nest on each side of it,—an arrangement which seemed satisfactory to both parties. All went well for about a week, when it was found that the straw had sunk below the partition, and, the avoirdupois of Mrs. Pardiggle being the greater, the eggs had all rolled in to her nest. She was sitting on twenty-six, while poor Miss Flite had none; but as the latter seemed blissfully unconscious of any deficit, while the former, owing to her voluminous foliage, could easily cover all the eggs, we thought it best to leave their tranquillity undisturbed.
Thirteen chickens were the result of this coöperative incubation. Tom happened to be at the barn when the triumphant Pardiggle, with loud maternal cluckings, sailed out of it with the entire brood of fledglings at her heels. It seemed to him that a light suddenly shone in upon the befogged intellect of Miss Flite; for, screaming maniacally, she dashed from her compartment and flew into the midst of the brood, making frantic efforts to secure a fair division of the spoils.
“I hope you gave her some of them,” I said to Tom when he had finished his narration.
“Yes, six; though feeling that I was foolishly sentimental in doing it.”
“No, Tom, it was right and just,—a merited reward for twenty-one days of inefficient faithfulness.”
I am grieved to relate that Mrs. P., with unscrupulous pertinacity, through bribes and blandishments lured all those chickens back except two, which Miss Flite continued “to have and to hold” until they grew into beautiful young pullethood.
If it surprises you that our mania for names is carried into poultrydom, just observe fowls closely for a time, and you will discover that not only are they possessed of marked individuality, but also of many of the characteristics of people you have known. For instance, a dapper glossy-black hen had a topknot like a high silk hat, and grotesquely long wing feathers resembling a frock coat, which gave her such a look of masquerading in male attire that “Dr. Mary Walker” seemed the only possible name for her. “The Doctor” is an impulsive, self-willed creature. Observing her friends going, one by one, “into the silence,” she apparently reasoned that the social whirl was over, that it would probably be dull in the yard for a time, and so concluded to go into the sitting business herself. Looking the quarters over, she found a desirable flat; and though the rooms were all taken, she arrogantly ousted a timid dark-complexioned tenant of Spanish descent, taking immediate possession of her home, her goods and chattels. The evicted one hung about her old home, lamenting bitterly; and though frequent efforts were made to reinstate her, all were futile. No matter how often or how violent “The Doctor’s” removal, an hour later she would be found back in the same place. Losing patience at last, Tom said in disgust: “Well, stay there, then, you confounded old trespasser! You look ridiculous enough, perched up there, with your hat on and your coat-tails hanging over that box. You have just taken this up as a fad, and you’ll mighty soon be sick of it.”
If “The Doctor” heard, she made no sign, but continued to gaze steadfastly toward the Pacific Ocean, and never turned a feather. Having won the battle, she settled down to business in a resolute way; and we thought that perhaps, after all, she wasn’t so flighty as she looked.
A week later Tom said, “You can’t guess whom I saw up in the woods to-day.”
“Robin Hood?”
“No.”
“Friar Tuck?”
“No; one more guess and you’re out.”
After deep thought I hazarded, “Countess Irma and her little wood-carver.”
“Oh, you’re away off! It was Dr. Mary Walker.”
“Good gracious! What was she doing away up there?”
“Sauntering along the brook, with a gay bevy of friends, picking up pebbles and grasses, seemingly quite care-free and joyous.”
After this she was seen every day stalking over the fields. Great was our surprise when we found she really had hatched seven chickens. But having hatched them, she apparently didn’t want them, or know what to do with them. She just stood in a far corner of the coop and eyed them gloomily, making no effort to feed, amuse, or instruct them. She evidently never told them a word about hawks, and the very first day they were allowed to go out for exercise two were carried off, and the next day another; the following morning she came straight to the house with the remaining four, threw them on my hands, walked off among the tall ferns, and never came back to them. The little dew-bedraggled things stood in a shivering huddle, peeping for their mother, until my nerves could no longer endure it. I brought them in, fed, and wrapped them up warmly; but still came those anxious cries, shrill and incessant. Then I remembered that Thoreau says, “Little chickens taken from the hen and put in a basket of cotton will often peep till they die; but if you will put in a book, or anything heavy, which will press down the cotton and feel like the hen, they will go to sleep directly.” Looking around for a weight that would “feel like the hen,” an inspiration seized me. I took a fluffy feather duster, warmed it slightly, and placed it over them, and was instantly rewarded by hearing a soft, gentle twittering,—“the low beginnings of content,” which soon ended in perfect quiet. In the hush that followed, I blessed the “Recluse of Walden” for the happy hint which had floated to me across the years.
After that, whenever an ailing chicken was brought to me for treatment, I usually clapped the duster over it and let nature take its course. Sometimes, it is true, when I lifted the duster to take a look at the patient, the patient was dead; but then it was quiet, and that’s something. I feel a great pride in being the discoverer of the feather-duster mother, and am quite sure that no other poultry preserve in the United States has as yet realized its possibilities.
That evening I advised Tom to look around for “Dr. Mary Walker,” as I feared she had met with some mishap. Returning later, he said: “Your fears were groundless. When I closed the door of the chicken-house, I glanced over the inmates, and, lo and behold, in the front row of the dress circle sat her Majesty ‘wrapped in the solitude of her own originality.’ She seemed quite at peace with herself and the world. If she had been on the ground floor, I believe I would have slapped her.”
It proved to be a clear case of desertion; finding the duties of motherhood irksome, she had shaken them off, leaving her children to me to bring up, as Mrs. Joe Gargery brought up Pip, “by hand.”