I had another harrowing experience the other day. So far this blog has been documenting tragedies and I guess this is no exception.
A dog ate my chicken the other day. Huey Lewis the Chicken died of her wounds (with a little help from my compassionate husband Ryan) on December 13, 2009.
She was a good chicken. One of our better layers. She was the only black chicken of six in the coop, it sounds funny, but it's true. Unlike the other chickens, three fairly tame white Wynandotes and two semi feral Rhode Island reds, Huey was an Black Austraulorp, and everything on her was black. Her glossy feathers (iridescent in certain lights) were black, her beak was black, everything on her was black but her pernicious little red comb, sticking up defiantly from the top of her head. We used to joke that she was our Radical Black Separatist chicken, named by Ryan after Huey of the Boondocks, who himself was named debatebly after Huey Lewis and the News. Like her namesake, she stood out from the rest of the flock, that Huey. But the most striking thing about her was her eyes.
Again, unlike the other chickens, Huey's eyes were BLACK. Not only black at the pupil like the amber eyed other chickens, but at the iris. They were like huge liquid pools of obsidian, and she would blink them at you in such a wild eyed way you were forced to check yourself before just nudging her away with your foot when it came to be feeding time. She looked back at you. This bird was not the bird the guilty omnivore would be the most likely to eat. And yet I just such an omnivore, did eat her. After the dog got a crack that is.
It sounds terrible I know. But what were we supposed to do?
Before those righteous vegetarians among you dismiss us as barbarians, eating their dead pet, let me explain.
The back story:
December 13, 2009 started out like any other December day in Albuquerque, sunny and cold. I went as I did many mornings, approximately every other one, to go check on, feed, water, get the eggs from and let out the chickens. These mornings though literally freezing cold (the chicken water, the fish pond, and the dogs water all covered with a thin layer of ice)I got up, took my one egg, and let out the chickens. This was not an unusual day. In summer the I would wake up to up to five eggs, one from each of the layers, but perhaps because of the cold weather we had been reduced to getting only one. Maybe it was Huey's...
At any rate I let them out and went back in the house. Ordinarily at that time I would have been cleaning the house and preparing for the communal brunch we have been hosting every Sunday morning with only two exceptions since May. But on this day, December the 13, for the third time ever, brunch was canceled. Or at least postponed. The week prior, a normal brunch where as usual everyone descended after 11 am with various things, vegetables, berries, leftovers and the like, we had planned to have this day, December 13, be our first annual non-denominational Holiday Linner. (Linner or course being a cross between lunch and dinner as opposed to breakfast and lunch)
So that cold bright morning I woke up early and sent the text canceling brunch and inviting everyone to Linner that was to be held graciously by fellow brunchie Sammo at his lovely Nob Hill house. As of yet, I had no idea what I was going to bring to this meal, and haven't even thought of it.
An hour or two later, I was awoken from luxurious Sunday morning sleep it (a rare occasion) by the first of the brunch guests who didn't get the text. Travis, another brunch regular, doesn't even have a phone and showed up as he usually does empty handed but ready to cut and cook whatever showed up that day (he is a great sou chef and cook and often is the one doing the preparing). We were just sitting down to coffe when the doorbell rang again, and Krista and Kevin and their dog Pondi arrive, (K and K HAVE a phone but with their new Christmas Iphones did not receive the text on their old outmoded phones.)
There we are, all having coffee and laughing at the decently well attended canceled brunch, when one of the usually happily playing dogs makes a tremendously aggressive sounding sound in the backyard. We all startle but I jump to my feet, " Shit! I forgot to put in the chickens!" I say as I sprint out the door followed by all of the guests and my trusty new husband Ryan who probably already knows what is about to happen next.
Heart sinking, I run around into the back yard. I am stopped dead in my tracks not by death but little Huey, mauled and unable to stand, in a blizzard of black feathers and blood, still living and looking up at my painfully with her big black eyes. What happens next is hazy for me, as I my eyes are immediately covered by first my own and then Ryan's big soft hands, as I involuntarily wail in horror and sadness right in front of my horrified guests.
Pondi is a young dog, a happy go lucky Mutt with questionable heritage, saved as our dogs are from the pound by Krista and Kevin when he was just a few months old. But unlike our dogs, Pondi was not raised with chickens, moreover he was not raised with stern reprimands every time he so much looked at the chickens, and as this was the first chicken he had ever seen, the results were predictable and terrible.
Krista, a vegetarian, was especially, perhaps equally horrified, and as Kevin and Travis blocked our view as Ryan broke Huey's neck, Krista and I held each other and as I cried the terrific sobs of a woman who had not yet managed to handle the death of any and all animals.
And then Kevin held Krista as she cried, and Ryan held me, petting my head exactly as you would the a little girl who lost her pet.
After this we all sat on the porch in stunned near silence. Though we are mostly quit I asked for a cigarette, and K, neither of which who smoke bought me a whole pack.
So as Ryan and Travis set to work plucking her and gutting her, Krista and Kevin and I sat and bonded. We talked not about death but about life, about energy and the cycle of life, the way that things come and go and are set in motion even before they happen, and how ironic it was that this was to happen now, the day of the canceled brunch and the Linner I had not yet begun to cook for. And there I had it, I would cook Huey for Linner. It seemed the only fitting thing to do, to not waste this small death.
I wasn't mad, just sad. It could have happened with our own dogs at some point, and it did happen and there was nothing that could be done. It was no more their negligence than my own. I think we are all closer after that experience.
Anyway, later that afternoon, the two Ks and newly initiated Pondi had left, and I stood by the kitchen table, mixing my own almond quinoa stuffing, stuffing the bird and getting her ready to roast. Later still I put on my cocktail attire, brought the freshly dressed bird to Sammo's and put her in the oven to roast.
She was delicious, exactly as you would expect a homegrown chicken raised cage free and with love to taste. Except for her thighs, which unlike hens raised without access to exercise or even sunlight in battery cages were tough, muscular and virtually inedible.
I still miss seeing my little black chicken. The coop looks different now with out timid little Huey pecking away, a tiny black shadow in spite of herself and all of the other chickens. But come Spring, if K&K don't buy me a new chicken first, Ryan says I get to break the "no more animals" rule (we already had these five, now four hens, one rooster, two dogs, two goldfish, two parakeets and one cat on this unhuge urban Albuquerque property) and breed out some chicks!
So there you have it folks, life, death and rebirth. It's all part of the whole (chicken?) enchilada.
Thank you Huey. You were a good chicken. And delicious.
