Friday, April 18, 2008

Leap Season




I heard a big ruckus this morning and stuck my head out of the ark in time to see the neighbor's young hound running off with one of our Dominiker roosters in his mouth.
A few minutes later, when I was at the door telling Davey what had happened, Matt the neighbor called.
He said his dog had dropped the rooster and the bird had gone off into the unmowed field of the next property down the hill. Matt went looking for the bird, but saw only a few feathers, and no rooster.
I myself saw most of the tail feathers on our driveway.
The tail is now in a vase on Davey's table, and I didn't much expect to see the rest of the rooster again , but he was back here this evening,
Now the other roosters are chasing him around, because a rooster without his tail looks like a hen from some other tribe, and gets punked.
They are quite the jerks these roosters, but I can't be so critical of the neighbor's dog. He is a bird dog after all, and made a good soft-mouth retrieve....otherwise the bird would not have been able to walk home and run from his persecutors.
Some of this Shit is happening because suddenly it is summer - eighty degrees when it hasn't been seventy before now .
Turkeys are flying over the road.
A mated pair of pheasants and a pair of mallards are feeding with the roosters. Local kids on four-wheelers are tearing up and down the border lane along of the state land, rutting in the mud.
Everything is breaking out of its borders.
The hens will want to be coming out again soon; and then all Hell will break loose.
Davey went to town two days ago and came back with thirty fruit trees with bare-roots wrapped in plastic, their tops already greening.
He put them into the empty trailer until he can get the time to plant them, and if that doesn't happen very soon, they will grow out the windows, then die.




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