The Complete Hen

The Complete Hen

Now and again I like to see

A hen who still roams wide and free,

Who crosses roads and flies o’er ditches,

Who cackles till she gets the stitches,

Who hunts for grasshoppers in the stubble,

And scratches merrily in old rubble,

Who cocks her head when the roosters crow,

Who knows all things a hen should know:

When to obey the housewife’s call

And when to pay no heed at all,

Where grubs grow best, and how to roost

On some low branch without a boost;

And last of all, to prove her worth

(Her nearness to the rights of earth)

Let her become an agitator,

Fixed enemy to the incubator,

And obstinately steal her nest

And shelter chicks beneath her breast.

Elizabeth Coatsworth.

Our hens are quite "complete", as Elizabeth Coatsworth put it. They have interbred with game hens, fighters and bantams in the village, and no longer lay "one a day" like good rhode islanders should. They disappear for weeks and reappear with fourteen more mongrel non-layers just like themselves. They are fiendishly difficult to catch, wild and untrusting. Mum's adventures in chicken-catching keep us busy plotting ways and means: Building traps, sneaking up in the dead of night, shooting at them and spiking the feed with rum have FAILED, sometimes spectacularly! We need a new plan. A good plan. These chickens have to go, if Mum is going to have any success starting again with a nice new flock of friendly layers.

Keeping chickens has it's ups and downs, as I've mentioned before... The eggs are so amazingly delicious that for years the boys didn't like to eat "shop eggs" because they had "no taste". "REAL" chicken eggs that you go and steal from under a chicken before breakfast are creamy, tasty, and have bright orange yolks that stand up like a ping-pong ball when you fry 'em. Not much like the watery flavourless stuff we eat now since our chickens have given up producing!

So we're going to eat the chickens, à la The Swedish Chef. But first we have to catch them. Does anyone have a plan? Any brilliant ideas? Put your thinking caps on. We're getting desperate here!