Lifestyles

How the Hen House Turns

A few days after Peeky’s second brood hatched, disaster once again loomed large over the chicken pen. I heard the mother hen suddenly cut loose with her unmistakable S.O.S. call, and I envisioned all five chicks in the drink this time. But when I looked out, I had to laugh at the scene in the chicken pen.

Peeky was flapping madly from the ground to the top of the six-foot fence, up and down, ferociously and futilely launching attack after attack at a cool black predator (nearly her size) sitting on the top railing, his head Read More

Home Country

Steve, the tall cowboy of us philosophy types, was riding a young horse through town the other day to get him used to “boogers.”

To gentle a horse, he explained, you give them something to booger at, and then talk them out of it. You keep coming up with new boogers and calming the horse until screaming fire engines and jet exhaust are no problem at all.

He rode up to the Campbell house and saw Anita, Dud’s wife, shaking out a throw rug. The young horse began blowing nuclear snot all over the front yard and his eyes bugged out.

“Anita,” Steve said, “would you mind coming over here Read More

How the Hen House Turns

After Peeper hatched, mother hen Peeky’s protective skirt of feathers was always ready to protect her chick when he ran from danger, whether real, like crows, or imaginary, like me. But when he flew up to the edge of the cut-off milk jug we used as a water trough—and fell in—Peeky let out such a wild squawking we raced down to the pen in seconds, adrenalin pumping.

We lifted Peeper’s struggling, bedraggled wet body from the water to save him from a drowning his mother clearly recognized but couldn’t prevent. With barely a Read More