If she’d lived,
this Easter would have been the fourth birthday of my eldest hen,
Annabelle. She was the last of a tribe all named Annabelle, all of
whom arrived as day-old chicks on Easter Sunday 2004.
In
the intervening years, various Annabelles fell prey to dogs, skunks
and finally, last week, raccoons. Such is the life of the urban
chicken. And such is the predicament of the urban chicken farmer,
or any farmer, or any person for that matter, surrounded by life,
stalked by death and living with the nagging truth that you could
have done better.
Annabelle had lately preferred roosting
on top of the coop, which I condoned. Thanks to the free will I
allowed her, she tempted the raccoons and thus was plucked from the
garden of life.
Rebirth is life’s answer to death.
It keeps the numbers up and balances out the longing, regret and
other accumulated byproducts of living. No wonder Easter is pegged
to the vernal equinox. What better time to celebrate the transit of
Jesus from death to life than springtime, when the earth is reborn
from the dregs of winter’s killing spree.
But where
does the Easter egg fit into all of this? And what’s up with
the bunny? Some believe the struggle of a baby chick to escape its
shell symbolizes the struggle of Jesus to escape the confines of
death. The egg, like the bunny, is a symbol of fertility. And
celebrations of which have been enacted around the spring equinox
for centuries.
After last year’s dog attack, which
killed the rest of Annabelle’s generation, she lived alone
while I awaited the arrival of replacement day-old chicks, ordered
online. As the minimum order was 25 birds, I found four sets of
neighbors interested in raising chickens.
Annabelle,
meanwhile, was prone to wander, as if looking for her lost friends.
She crossed the road, hung out under the neighbor’s bunny
cage and roamed the back alley. To keep her around, I had to lock
her in the pen.
The post office called me one weekend —
they call immediately when live chicks arrive in the mail –
and in minutes I had them home, where they huddled together under a
heat lamp in a big fuzzy clump. The cat was curious and jealous.
When the chicks were big enough, with real feathers, I
put them outside with Annabelle, who seemed more annoyed by the
intrusion than happy for the company. An upstart I’d named
Baldy broke the tension by pecking at Annabelle’s mouth in a
filial way.
Annabelle eased into her role as surrogate
mama hen. She taught the little girls how to take dust baths in the
bike shed, where the ground is always dry. She taught them how my
digging projects around the back yard could yield easy worms.
Luckily, she didn’t teach them to wander. Instead she
followed me around like a puppy, waiting for something good to
happen, making that gentle cooing sound I miss so much. In this way
she taught them that, despite looking scary, I’m actually OK.
The morning I found Annabelle’s remains, the new
hens were still freaked out, having listened to the violent death
of their mama hen. After I buried her beneath a rose plum tree, I
let the survivors roam the yard.
They were surprisingly
clingy. Each hen was suddenly interested in hanging out, the way
only Annabelle used to. At first I assumed they were scared, and
looking to me for protection. But they were making those cooing
sounds that Annabelle used to make. It was as though I had become
what Annabelle had been to them, leader, protector and teacher. And
at the same time, they became to me the bundle of chicken love that
Annabelle once was.
Meanwhile, in the weeks just before
Annabelle died, the new girls began laying eggs. Thanks to the
diversity of my chick order, the eggs come in rainbow colors of
pink, white, blue and brown.
The raccoons that killed
Annabelle were back the very next night, big as dogs. I chased them
off, nailing the neighbor’s fence with a rock. I don’t
blame the raccoons — they’re just trying to stay alive.
Unlike the dog, who killed for sport, raccoons kill to eat. A few
days after I buried what was left of Annabelle, something dug up
her remains and took them away.
Easter is a realistic
celebration, acknowledging that life depends on death just as the
chicken depends on the egg. Chicken and egg, life and death. These
states are framed by the murky thresholds that separate them. Maybe
it doesn’t matter which came first.
Ari
LeVaux is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He writes Flash in
the Pan, a syndicated food column, and lives in Missoula,
Montana.
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