All chickens are strange, if you ask me, but some are stranger than others. Ever since our last snow a couple of weeks ago, my mom and I have been involved in the “Case of the Disappearing Chicken.”
I guess it started the afternoon of the sudden snowfall. I came home from work early and after I fed the horses, it occurred to me that the chickens had probably gone into the chicken house and I could save my mom a trip outside by fastening them up. Surely even dumb chickens would have had sense enough to go inside to get out of all that snow! Not exactly. Most of them indeed were inside, but a little group had taken refuge in the shed by the smokehouse and I had the devil of a time getting them to leave their questionable and non-varmint proof shelter for the safety of the chicken house. After a lot of squawking, scrambling, and loud complaining (from all of us) I got them safely tucked in for the night and went to tell my mom of my good deed.
Sometime after dark, Mom called to say that she had just gone out on the front porch and found a little black hen sitting in one of the chairs, hunkered down in the cold. She picked her up and put her on the back porch until morning. Little did we know that this would not be an isolated incident, brought on by the snow.
The next night Mom called me again to say that she like to have never got that little black hen off the front porch and into the chicken house. She said she was clucking like she had a nest somewhere but it was nowhere to be found on the front porch but that she was adamant about staying there. I thought to myself that maybe she wanted to spend another night on the back porch, but that would probably be giving her too much credit for good sense. The plot thickened the next morning when Mom called me again to report that when she turned the chickens out, the little black hen made a beeline for the front porch. Not unexpected, but what really mystified her was that, in the time it took her to return her coffee cup to the kitchen, the little black hen disappeared into thin air. She had looked on, under and behind everything on the porch and had searched the front yard, the side yard and the garage with no success. I joined in the search and we again walked all around the house and investigated even tiny spaces that surely no hen could fit into. It was truly a mystery.
I went home and a couple of hours later, I came out of the house and found a little black hen on my carport. Now, since I had not seen the disappearing hen, I could not make an identification, but it seemed to me to be a logical conclusion. Since I was on the way to pick Mom up for a trip to town, I drove over and told her about my discovery. But, when we pulled into the driveway, the hen was nowhere to be seen. We searched the carport, walked all the way around the house and I even investigated the dog houses and the bed of my truck. Not even a feather was visible. I was beginning to feel like there was something uncanny about this chicken, but as we drove past my barn on the way out, there she was! We got out so Mom could make a positive ID and the little black hen was just clucking away and scratching in the dirt about the horse stalls. “That’s her,” Mom said, and we both agreed that not only was she the mysterious disappearing chicken but a very speedy mysterious disappearing chicken.
She spent the rest of the day in my front yard, scratching under the bird feeder and making occasional trips to the barn, where I began to suspect she had plans for a nest. Just before dark, Mom came over and persuaded her (with my shooing from behind) to follow her back home. She has been back every day since. It’s funny to watch her march over here, like she has a bus to catch or a job to report to and she has to be on time. And yesterday morning, she had dug most the dirt out the flower box on my front porch and was sitting in it clucking away. Maybe I will have fresh eggs for breakfast tomorrow!
