Friday, April 1, 2011

Dead Cheryl


I thought I would get into trouble yesterday. I killed our rooster Cheryl.

Murderer Mick!

This little tyrant has been tormenting me for months. After my last rooster, which also attacked me regularly, I swore "never again," but relented when one of the hen-chicks Aimee ordered from Murray McMurray Hatchery turned out to be a rooster.

But I finally had enough. I was out in the woods close to the barn with the dogs, trying, of all things, to take a quiet whiz, when Cheryl sidled up. He came a little to the left, a little to the right, coming in at diagonals, getting closer every time, trying to stay on my blind side.

Like I couldn't actually see him! What a sneak. The Libyan opposition could learn tactics from this rooster.

Naturally, I felt just slightly more exposed than usual, with my fly down and all. Is nothing sacred? When a guy can't take a leak in his own woods, there's something wrong with the world. But I kept an eye on him, and nothing much happened.

Until I pulled up my zipper and turned my back to leave, when the little bugger flew at me, all spurs and beak!

This was the last straw. Not only has he attacked me about thirty or forty times, but he lords it over the hens like a monster, and it's only a matter of time before he attacks someone else, our elderly neighbor to the west, or the young mother and baby that live to our north, who come by with stroller every day to get the mail.

A short hour after this, the last of Cheryl's attacks, he was in the crock pot with the power turned up to full. End of. I fed his entrails to the hens.

Waste not, want not.

It was while I was hanging him to be plucked that it occurred to me that I should probably have talked this over with Aimee. After all, she raised him from a chick, and he was a very pretty rooster, in Pittsburgh Steeler colors and all. But Aimee was at work.

This gives you an idea of the capriciousness of my death sentence decision: If I hadn't come home early to watch over the new lambs, Cheryl would still be alive.

So when Aimee came home late after giving an exam, I told her that I'd done "a very bad thing."

"What did you do?"

"I killed our rooster?"

"Oh." "OK..."

"...give me a hand to unload this stuff, will you?"

I guess Cheryl's life didn't amount to much around here.

Pretty good sized bird though. Almost couldn't fit him in the crock pot.

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