CHICKEN NEWS from the BUTTERFLY TREE #5

Feb. 2005

‘Shock and Awe’ in the Chicken Yard. . .

I have been wondering how people decide on the specific words they choose to name events. Take the phrase “SHOCK AND AWE”, now infamous in our nation’s history.

The choice of the word “shock” is clear. Obviously the USA wanted to surprise and “get even” for the horrible disaster in New York, the bombing of the twin towers. But the word “awe” made me puzzle. Why the choice of “awe”? To install fear? To use a very overused descriptive word that is recognized by all young people as approval, as in the comment “awesome, dude!” and encourage teenagers and young people to take up arms and join the draft? Or was it perhaps meant to title an event designed to show off a kind of inspirational “Power” as in a July 4th fireworks celebration? Perhaps there was a touch of putting the gods (or even God Herself) into the n aming of this bombing of a middle eastern country, instilling an almost religious fervor into the event?

I would have named it RETRIBUTION and stopped there. But my mind is not a military mind and I admit I do not understand their language or their weapons. Neither do I understand their intentions or their use of innuendo in the English language, or their actions.

Be that as it may, there was no doubt about what happened in my chicken yard on the 27th of January, for when I let the chickens and ducks out of their cages and returned to bring them grain at 7:30 AM, what I found would have been appropriately called “Shock and Horror.” There, laid out in a row, were three bloodied ducks and four twisted chickens—dead in the duck yard, and the few remaining chickens scattered and screeching in trees, bushes, and under the cabin.

When I found that Too Too, the smallest chicken who laid the tiniest eggs had survived, I r ejoiced, and after gathering up the remaining fowl I put them back in the chicken yard and began to clean up the mess.

There lay Thelma, Bon Appetite, and Angelique, necks askew, one-two-three in a line. They had laid two eggs there in the bushes before their murderer had found them. Whatever had killed them had not eaten them, rather just laid them out in a row. . . no raccoon would do that, I thought.

And Desdemona, Butterball, Lulubelle, and Trouble lay on the ground not far from the freshly laid duck eggs, their parting gift to me. they “Holy Eggs”!

I picked their bodies up one by one, wrapped them in plastic bags, and buried them in my tightly covered garbage can. I didn’t want bury them in the ground— in case the vicious animal who had attacked returned to feast.

Being a person of action, I then drove to Sonoma and bought 5 more chickens and established them in the yard along with the remaining faithful Speckles, my English Plymouth hen, Too Too, my honey colored bantam hen, and the rooster, Magic II.

Arriving back at my home with two boxes of chickens, I discover from Dana, who is the staunch guardian of the Cabin, and a nursing student who came from Alaska to live at Muir Beach, that the bobcat has just erupted again, leaving one more chicken dead, one in a neighbor’s yard, and the rest hiding wherever they can, to escape the large bobcat that sits in the chicken yard, boldly waiting to attack. Dana hollers and her dog Kenai barks, and the bobcat disappears. This time he has had time to kill only one more.

However the next day he attacks and this time drags away Too Too, the littlest chicken who always came to greet me. The maintenance man had a bead on him but I asked him not to shoot knowing that we can’t shoot a firearm when any other buildings are less than 150 yards away . . the length of a football field.

Fish and Game tells me I can trap or kill any predator who attacks me or my property, ON my propert y, so as the bobcat and her cub hightail it over my fence, I puzzle about the proper course of action.

Since last Thursday, the maintenance man has built a very strong cage around the large box into which we lock them every night. And so I see that one predator bobcat with no one to stop it can make innocent chickens live behind wire, and they, the victims, are forced to be caged, because there are no boundaries for Bobcats.

I guess nowadays it is the same for political predators who can “shock and awe” us into submission and “protect the American people” with bigger newer cages and confine us by rewriting the laws we used to live by, by committing murder under the law, and building our own cages bigger and stronger.

Well, as some oeple used to say, “seen one predator, you seen ‘em all!” As for me, I’d take a bobcat over a politician any day. At least I know when I’m under attack.

THE DAY BEFORE VALENTINES DAY

We wait for chicken to bake,

watch Sixty Minutes,

news coverage about

the maverick missile,

the name is interesting.

Maverick, something unreliable,

someone you can’t count on.

A maverick does not make

a good husband. The men who

speak are experts

at arms, missiles, systems, bombs:

they know about weaponry.

They must have changed

a billion brain cells into images

about destruction: their work is

War. I wonder about

the women they make love to . . .

Karla Andersdatter