Last week, one of the hens refused to vacate the laying box. When approached, she growled like an electric kettle on the edge of boiling. Determined to get my end of the bargain, I reached under her feathers whereupon she gave me a fierce peck on the hand. “Looks like we got a brooder,” said Alison, checking her notes. “Maybe we didn’t need to order so many chicks.”
Before Dora became broody, she was an agile Spotted Sussex, quick to assess and exploit any weakness in the fence. Her independent streak drove the rooster crazy. “Where are you? I can’t see you!” he crowed nervously. “Would you quit your damn wandering and get over here!” But her urge to explore was stronger than the force of Franklin’s commands. Christened Dora the Explora, she tended towards the rough edge of the forest where squiggly things, with feet splayed out like a pair of fins, squirmed in the rotting flesh of a felled tree. When we herded her back to the flock, she quickly turned and raced towards her companions, making it clear that she only moved of her own accord. Like a Spanish hidalgo, she complied but she never obeyed.
Now that she’s taken up brooding, Dora has the orbit of a Hudson blanket. Responsible for keeping half a dozen eggs warm, she doesn’t have time for running around and looking for bugs. It takes all her concentration just to fill up the laying box with her feathered mass. Once a day, she hops down, takes a long draught of water, releases a sizeable poo, and then gets back on her eggs. At least that’s what we are told she does. Each time we look in the hen house, she’s at her station. “Hello, Dora,” we say and she opens her mouth once like menacing lizard. It doesn’t matter whether it’s almost ninety in the hen house or thundering and lightening outside, Dora keeps to her task. Heat and humidity do not cause her to abandon her eggs. The tempest in the heavens does not frighten her off her nest. A brooding hen will not budge.
Given her earlier history of wandering, we weren’t sure she would make a good mother. In fact, she got off to a rough start. Two days into the term, she was out the window of the hen house and running up and down the curtain drain just at the edge of the forest. We herded her back to the flock, one of us lifting the electric fence enough so that she could scoot under, and then we started worrying. Should we get a heat lamp for the eggs? Find a substitute? With Dora off running around, it looked like the responsibility of keeping eggs warm would fall on our featherless shoulders.
Luckily, Ugly Betty was just then settling down to a serious brood. She had occupied the second of three laying boxes and was not too discommoded when I slid Dora’s abandoned clutch under her extended bulk. “Phew! That was close,” we said and then noticed that Dora was heading back to the hen house with a serious maternal attitude.
“Quick,” said Alison, “grab another egg and put it in the laying box before she gets into a scuffle with Ugly Betty.” There was one egg for the taking, left by a laying hen, and two eggs poking out at the edge of Ugly Betty. Despite her growling and deep-throated curses, I nabbed them. Dora didn’t seem to notice that her six eggs were now only three. She hopped into the laying box, adjusted herself over the eggs and then settled down for the duration.
It takes twenty-one days for chicks to hatch. Twenty-one days of heat and humidity and thunderstorms. Dora and Ugly Betty are into their second week of gestation and their broodiness has visibly matured. They are tethered to some deeper anchor in the earth, operating at a glacier rhythm. The two of them are tuned into the music of the spheres, the great Ohm of the cosmos. This is the way life is made, slowly and with a singular focus.
Meanwhile, the rest of us worry about getting in the tomato plants and where to set up potato beds so they stay out standing water. We wonder about weather patterns that turn trailer parks into marinas, and roads in the state’s capital into mighty rivers. While Dora and her companion brood, wars continue and college graduates look for work. From most vantage points, the world seems completely out of whack. If there were somewhere sane to go, anyone who could would already be there.
But not having the option of escape, there is always Plan B, by which I mean Plan Brood. The quietness and contemplation that emanates from the hen house provides a welcome respite from the world’s collective panic. Those two hens are beyond reaction, beyond worry, even beyond the authority of their rooster. Day after day they steep in the rich generative waters of reproduction. The rooster crows, the laying hens scream, “Mercy, mercy,” at the sight of a garden hose, but Dora and Ugly Betty will not be moved.
One might be tempted to call them subservient, fixated as they are on their clutch of eggs. Glued to their proto-progeny, these two gals seem in need of a Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan, someone to tell them they are capable of far more than sitting on eggs. But when I suggested the benefits of liberation, they each fixed a brooding eye upon me. They looked at me as if we were separated by a vast chasm. They were in the bowels of creation while I was a mere speck on the horizon. “Who?” they asked, “Who is in need of liberation?”
0 comments:
Post a Comment