If You Can't Laugh

Repeat after me: Homesteading is the best life ever, homesteading is the best life ever, homesteading is the best life . . . Okay, sure. Whatever.

And then there's taking an empty five-gallon propane cylinder with you to the feed store to get it refilled, having it pushed to one side of the SUV's trunk to fit feed in there, and having the still-empty cylinder become unbalanced on the way home. If you're sitting there thinking, "uh, oh!" then you're right. I opened up the tailgate to remove the chicken and gamebird food and out rolled the cylinder. It did a nifty little swan dive bounce before coming to rest on my left foot, mashing two of my toes and banging up against my shin before rolling into the mud puddle behind me. If you picture me bending over while clutching my leg with tears in my eyes, moaning, "oh, oh, owowowow" with Luna and Vex looking on (waiting patiently for me to quit the nonsense and give them cookies), then you have the picture.

Thus began several days of, "oh no, you didn't," with Life laughing hysterically and pointing at me with mock derision. Okay, maybe not so "mock," but you get the point. We had many barrels of venison to process, but we were also given some nice venison roasts and wild boar sausage (made with yummy pineapple and lots of jalapeno!) as part of the reward. We found a Seminole pumpkin that we missed in the brush and Dan made another pumpkin pie. Good things happened. On top of all that, however, came 27-degree nights--way too early!--tree trimmers attempting to cut the wrong branches, and a dog getting sick. Add to that three days of rain and you've set the stage for a load of fun.

And then, there were chickens.

Chickens are, perhaps, the most ridiculous bird known to man. I once had a rooster who would attack me every time I brought food and water out to his flock. You can't get much dumber than that. So now, when I have chicks in the brooder, I handle them a lot, so that they recognize me as the source of All Good Things. It often works, although . . . see the first sentence in this paragraph. Eventually, there comes the time at which you have to remove the little dinosaurs from the brooder to their grow-out pen, tractor, or coop. Quite often, the process goes smoothly. The transfer is completed with a few squawks and ruffled feathers but is otherwise uneventful. Then there are the times that Vex tries to help. In my defense, Vex had seemed to be desensitized to chickens.

Okie dokie, then.

My first clue that something might go wrong was his checking out the pan of food in the chicken tractor. "Watcha dooooin'?" he seemed to ask in his inimitable fashion. He's so big and strong looking, that it's sometimes hard to remember that Vex is still a puppy. He's roughly 17 inches at the shoulder and, if I had to guess, he must weigh about 35 pounds. Everything Vex does is at speed. He rarely walks anywhere and tends to bounce around a lot when he gets where he's going. If Vex were a TFT, he'd be adorable. He's still awfully darn cute, but that's said with a dog-loving "auntie's" eyes. Even with his loving attention to my every move, I thought that it would be relatively easy to move the chicks, although I did reject the idea of moving them using a dog crate. The last time I moved birds in a dog crate, Badger bit the head off my favorite quail rooster because it stuck its head out between the wires.

So, I go over to the brooder and remove two of the four chicks, now fully feathered pullets and cockerels. I cradle the birds against me as I walk the 50 feet to the newly prepared tractor, one hand protecting heads, the other protecting feet. Vex bounces around me listening to the protesting clucks, having a rollicking good time. I get to the tractor, toss in the chicks, and slam the door shut. Normally, I'd be gentle and reassuring to them, but . . . Vex. We return to the brooder. I'm limping pretty well now, because it's cold and it's misting rain and I've been walking a lot. I slide back the top of the brooder and remove the third black chick. Vex bounces over to me, Just To Look, when he thuds into the brooder. The brooder, which rests across two metal stands, crashes to the floor, the fourth chick (again, my favorite), still inside. Vex sniffs around the brooder, which has landed in an almost vertical position, trying to find the chick.

Desperate to save my favorite, cognizant of the fact that he'd rip its head off with puppy-playing-with-a-toy disregard if I let it get too close while rescuing the final chick, I did the only thing I could do. I unceremoniously dumped the black chick that I was holding into the molasses tub we use to store the goat food and closed the lid. Then I reached into the brooder, I managed to liberate the gold chick from where she'd lodged herself. Clutching her to my chest, I removed the other chick from the molasses tub--where he was happily gorging himself on goat pellets. We walked to the tractor, where I divested myself of the chicks and closed everything up for the second time.

That's when Vex decided that the chicks were four squeaky toys that I had provided for his amusement. He ran around the tractor, tolling the chicks, trying to get them to stick their heads outside. He rubbed against the tractor, trying to get it to move, jumped against it to try to knock it over, all in less time than it takes for me to type it out. The magic "Anh!" sound had no effect, neither did he come when called. At the end of my rope, I marched over to the "desensitized" puppy and grabbed him by the collar. I frog marched poor Vex all the way to the house and put him into his ex-pen, where he should have been all along. I did give him his cookie for going right in, so he was fine with it, even though I could tell he wanted to follow me back to the chicken tractors. I secured the gates on the chicken yard (next year's garden) and thought I was done with the whole affair.

The following morning, I start typing this story, which I figured would make a great humorous piece. Dan had already called me twice: once for our daily morning conversation and the second time to tell me that there were two barrels of venison for me to process. At 10:15, he called me a third time. If you're thinking "uh oh" again, that's because you're beginning to think like a homesteader.

"I hate to bother you during your writing time," he said, "but your chicks have escaped."

"Have you seen any of them?" I asked.

"Two black ones."

Naturally. Being gold, my favorite chick would be the first one to go if a predator--or Vex--got them out. I rushed out the door and drove up to Dan's end of the property. It was still misty raining, my foot hurt more than ever, and I was in too much of a hurry to walk there. When I arrived, I see that Dan has cut to the chase. Vex is already in his ex-pen. There are times that Dan seems to be much smarter than I am. Dan emerges from the garden shed as I walk up to the fallow garden section that the chickens are currently fertilizing. He has a long-handled net in on hand and a machete in the other.

"They're in the vines outside the garden," he said, "I figured that I could flush them out toward you and you might be able to catch them with the dip net."

Not a bad plan. We've done similar before with escaped chickens. What we didn't figure on was that these chicks were 1/4 Modern Game Chicken, a breed known for its striking beauty, if not for its utility. However, MGCs are also tend to be wily, somewhat aggressive, and not fond of confinement, which suggests the reason Dan was given the original rooster in the first place. So there we were, in the misting rain, me stalking the chickens as they raced through the open garden between the two patches of vines on either side, Dan swinging away at the vines with the machete and proverbially kicking the chickens back into play, and Luna sitting on the sidelines wondering if she was finally going to get fed this morning.

It took about about thirty minutes of fruitless chicken stalking before we were drenched to our skin and ready to make soup out of all and sundry. Two things became apparent during our chase: the third black chick was still alive and the chicks were trying to stay near the adult hens in the larger tractor. We put away our tools, and then retrieved a dog crate from the kennel building. We set it up next to the adult hens with a small tray of food inside, reasoning that the chicks would gravitate toward the hens at sundown, whereupon I could shut the door on the dog crate and put them in a safe place till morning.

All of that was great, in theory. At sunset, I crept out to the garden. I've caught chickens at dusk or at night before. All you need to do is move slowly and keep your light dim. I crept into the chicken yard and eased myself around the perimeter, until I was within a few feet of the dog crate.

There was not a single chicken in the dog crate.

Now, mind you, they'd all been in there before we went in for supper. I was ready to let Vex inside the yard for an early Christmas dinner, when I spotted a darker area around the protruding end of the perch in the tractor. I didn't see the gold chicken, but at least one of the black ones was up there. I inched forward, and gently removed the first black chick from the perch. It squawked, but quietly. There was no movement from the other chicks. I gently removed the second chick, then reached for the third, which was on top of the dog crate below the perch. This time there was much squawking and flapping of wings. My gold chicken was about to head for the hills. I grabbed her by the wingtip as she tried to take off. I deposited my armload of chickens into the waiting crate, then loaded them into the car until we could decide what to do with them in the morning. When I went inside to give Dan the report, he said, "it's nice and warm in there. I imagine they'll be quite happy there until spring."

You might want to go elsewhere for chicken-raising advice.

Just saying.