Please Don’t Let the Sky Fall
I let the chickens out to play. We’d been at work and school for most of the day, they’d been cooped up (that’s where the word comes from--chicken coop) and the sun was shining here in Riverside. The hens are teenagers, but they are still cute, unlike many teenagers. They are 6 months old, one golden and friendly, one black, speckled and wary. They are sisters, named Butter and Smoke. A¶ They run around in the backyard, following me the way my daughters used to, when the garden was a daily-explored universe of ladybugs and earwigs and pink jasmine blossoms and green apricots like fuzzy pieces of jade. A¶ I am embarrassed to admit I feel tender and companionable toward these chickens. I will have to stay and babysit them, because within minutes our neighborhood hawk is circling above us, crying and warning and feinting in the wind. One morning after we first put the two chicks in an old rabbit cage, the hawk sat on top of the wire mesh, cocking his head. But if I’m here in the backyard, he stays away.
I sit on a wooden chair and watch them scratch the soil. Every few minutes, the chickens run over to see if I’m still there. I turn over a paving stone and they eat an entire nest of slugs in about two seconds. Very convenient. My older daughters, 16 and 14, don’t come into the garden very often now, because of SAT classes and basketball, and they don’t even want to rake leaves, much less help me destroy slugs. Last week, I moved two wooden crates full of tools, and when black widows dropped from the slats and ran toward my toes, Butter snapped them up. For a moment, I worried that she might be poisoned, but the spiders must have tasted good, because she looked frantically for more. Kids can’t do that.
Even my youngest daughter, Rosette, who is 10 and still loves the garden, often has homework. These are her chickens, but they are my odd company. Butter and Smoke come when I call them--as my girls used to--when I say loudly, “Look what we’ve got here,” and I move aside the birdbath. My girls used to have pillbug farms, and their Tonka trucks and bulldozers are still half-buried in the dirt.
Recently I attended a lecture on avian flu and learned that backyard poultry could be the first place where this disease will gain entry to our population. (I also learned that influenza viruses are ingenious and lethal, and that the Spanish flu, which killed millions of people from 1918 to 1919, was not from Spain, but began in Riley County, Kan., as an avian flu, and is thought to have mutated through bird droppings consumed by pigs into a swine flu, and then was transmitted to American troops stationed there for training. The soldiers took the virus on ships to Europe.)
Tom Scott, a natural resource specialist for the University of California who spoke during the seminar, believes the present avian flu virus, H5N1, will probably not travel to America through an infected wild bird. He showed us the migration patterns of this flu from Southeast Asia to Europe to Africa, a series of jagged routes running north to south. It looked the same as the pattern that took the West Nile virus through America, via mosquitoes and birds.
He and other experts don’t think sick migratory birds could make it across the Atlantic Ocean. They believe it will arrive on another winged carrier--an international flight, with an infected human. But some scientists believe birds will travel as usual from Asia to Alaska, bringing the virus to the western United States very soon. When migrating birds fly over Southern California in great numbers, which they do every year to seek shelter in the desert at the Salton Sea, they could spread the virus. Someone from the UC Cooperative Extension told me that I should put the chickens inside an enclosed, wood-roofed coop, and never let them be exposed to the wild.
I watch my chickens ruffle their feathers until they are bigger for a moment, like brief explosions of fringe, and then they settle down for their daily dirt bath. They like the moist soil near the rabbit cages, where they scratch out a shallow depression and open their wings to throw dirt onto their backs. That’s how chickens keep mites and bugs out of their feathers.
I had been feeling proud at my little utopia, my rabbit fertilizer that nurtures my corn crop, my corn cobs feeding the chickens, along with bugs I don’t want around anyway, and then the fresh eggs. But the chickens are pecking at the poop now. I have visions of influenza virus mutating into the rabbits, and Snowball, the meanest one, biting one of the girls.
Near my feet is a peanut hidden by our resident scrub jay, pushed into dead leaves under the geranium. Every day I find pecans hidden by the crows, who always forget their stash. Usually my girls and I consider the nuts found treasure and crack them open on the spot. But now I recall the viruses shown on the lecture-room screen, their mutation capabilities, and I see the bird poop on the fence and on the birdbath.
“You have chickens?” somebody at work invariably says to me, incredulous, frowning. “Actual chickens? You’d better get rid of them now. Haven’t you read Mike Davis’ book?”
I have.
“Why chickens?”
We’ve always had rabbits, and a dog. We have 12 rabbits now--they’re quiet, easy to play with, and they make great fertilizer. But my brother lived for years in an orange grove, next door to a man from Chihuahua who raised fighting roosters. My brother loved to see the birds grow and be trained, but he didn’t like the fighting part. He got a few roosters for himself, and trained his favorite rooster to sit on the couch with him and watch Monday Night Football, complete with Doritos for their snack.
Rosette wanted a farm like her uncle’s, and so several years ago my ex-husband brought her home with a shoebox containing two day-old chicks. Oldest trick in the book. Cute babies, held by a cute kid.
I learned that there are few sounds sweeter than baby chicks getting ready to go to sleep at night, in the laundry room in a tin washtub. It’s not peeping. It’s more of a strange little comforting song, directed at the sky turning purple, almost as if they were chanting to themselves what they’d done all day and what they planned to do tomorrow.
But my ex-husband doesn’t speak Spanish, and though he had tried to convey his desire for hens to the Mexican owners of the local feed store, the chicks quickly began to crow. One morning at 5 a.m. I called him during his graveyard shift and said, “You’d better come get your roosters.”
I have to give him credit. He took them to his backyard, where they tortured his neighbors, whose dogs tortured him. The roosters crowed so loudly and constantly that we had trouble talking to Daddy on the phone.
The dogs broke the fence eventually. But he bought two more chickens for us, insisting they were girls. Caramel and Fudge. We put them in a nice big coop, which was an old dog run, but they were still mean. Animals have personalities, and these females were mean enough to be on “The Bachelor.” Caramel ate her own eggs, which was just wrong. Fudge taught us the meaning of pecking order (we were last).
During the summer when the West Nile virus hit hard in Riverside County, both chickens got sick. Fudge recovered after losing her tail feathers, but Caramel languished for three days, getting weaker and weaker.
I put her in a separate cage, with water and food near her beak. It was hot, and the earth was hard, and I knew she would die in the morning, when I would have to get ready for work. Late that night I soaked the ground near the old bunny graves, marked by river rocks. Then I dug the hole, in the dark.
My ex-husband called during his night shift to see how she was. When I told him, he was shocked. “You dug the hole and she could see you? Dang. That’s cold. At least move her around the corner.”
I said, “You’re the one who keeps bringing me chickens.”
“I bring them for Rosette,” he said.
I buried Caramel at dawn. He brought Butter and Smoke soon afterward.
The other day Luis, an acquaintance from Corona, showed me how to hypnotize them. He laid Butter on her side while she struggled and squawked, and with a stick he drew a line in the dirt near her eyes, over and over, while murmuring, “Hey, hey, hey.”
He said, “If you do this right, they’ll just lie here forever, until you snap them out of it. I learned it on my grandma’s chicken ranch in Mexico.”
I watched Butter, who did look dizzy and limp.
“But why?” I asked.
Luis laughed and Butter ran off. “There was nothing else to do down there.”
I tried it once, but the motionless chicken made me nervous.
I don’t want to dig holes for these two birds stepping contentedly around my feet right now. I know the interface between the larger world and my yard, between the urban and wild, is permeable. I stay awake at night, hearing the skunk and possums lumbering through the leaves, thinking of the fleas that carry bubonic plague. I see the raccoon peer from the sewer drain across the street and think of rabies.
Amid the garden of blackberries, beds for corn and tomatoes and zucchini, the chickens eat everything, even spider eggs and microscopic insects invisible to me.
And when I am out checking the beans, I remember that chickens are women’s provenance. (That’s where the term “egg money” comes from.) All over the world, women are throwing corn for hens, hoping the hens will eat the grasshoppers decimating their plants. These new ones have not laid yet, but Fudge does, and I take today’s egg into the house. The teenaged chickens are on their own for now, because my daughters are calling me.
At the sink, though, washing the large brown egg while my kids do their homework at the kitchen table, I wonder how avian flu will drift into my small postage stamp of soil in this huge map of the world. Right now, the resident sparrows, a flock of 10 or so that live in my mock orange hedge, are following the chickens around the yard. The scrub jay is sitting on the fence. The hawk is gone, but he will return. Because the sky is going lavender, the huge flock of crows begins its flight to the river-bottom pecan grove, where crows have lived since I was a child. For the 17 years I’ve been in this house, they have flown over us in a long skein of trembling black, calling to each other. They were gone, that year of West Nile, and the sky was eerily silent.
I have the kitchen window open, and I am listening. The girls squabble over lined paper and talk about boys who think they’re players. Above the sound of traffic on the busy four-lane avenue outside, and the dogs barking and car stereos thumping, I’m listening for the hawk. And when the cry comes, it pierces the air like a dart--the high keening register, echoing off the tallest palm trees. I hurry outside and put the protesting chickens back in their cage for the day. The hawk flies far above me, circling, dipping, riding the currents. The wind tosses the branches of the carob trees.
In the air above us now, predators wait patiently, and in the soil under us, viruses and fleas thrive. And yet there are still young hens and children and those of us watching, narrowing our eyes, only vigilance and hope to protect us.
