DOA Chicken

Last week my seven year old son, Riley yelled "I just saw an animal!" We listened patiently but returned to eating not sure if he saw anything at all. A few minutes later chaos erupted and my husband yelled" Holy crap something got one of our chickens!" 

We all flew out of the door and started to wrangle the chickens who were out free ranging in our yard. Afterwards in our excitement we started to investigate in a CSI fashion, recreating the events and following the evidence. In general we all think we are much more clever than we really are. There was a big pile of feathers from our missing Chantecler, no blood trail and no trail of feathers. My husband soon found her under a tree at the back of my old garden. Her neck had a chunk taken out but she had no other wounds, apart from being dead. We discussed what got her and decided not to leave her there to be eaten only because we didn't want to further advertise tasty chicken dinner in our yard. We decided it was a Fisher that got our hen. 

Our next discussion went like this. My husband said "should we eat her?" I said  "No!, wait, do you think so?" We decided as she was a very old hen and  had a gaping neck wound we would not eat her. Then he said "I think I will put her in the freezer until Compost day". Our Green Bin accepts small animals which they turn into garden compost which then saves us from digging into the granite laden earth we call "soil" in our neck of the woods. I said "eww gross a dead chicken in the deep freeze". I quickly realized I was being ridiculous as dead chicken is often found in our deep freeze, just without feathers.

There it sits now, waiting for Green Bin Day. I have only once mistakenly tried to take it out, thinking it was something else. It became a sick and cruel joke we talked about  tricking our unsuspecting relatives into looking at but  we didn't. Often our family uses crude joking to deal with loss and tragedy. For all of my joking I am sad to have lost the old girl. She is from our very first flock which was the beginning of our quest for self sufficiency. In Three years she gave us hundreds of eggs and nourished our little family. Thank you chook.