Personal

In the days when I had chickens, I could watch them for hours.

One time I noticed that they were pecking at each others’ bottoms. I knew that wasn’t good and could lead to much worse, so I spoke to the vet.

He told me that they might have red spider mite. The problem with a mite infestation is that it causes a raw patch that attracts other chickens to peck at it.

The vet suggested a spray to eradicate the mites. That was good in principle, but how was I going to administer it?

I guess I could have asked someone what was the best way to administer the spray, but I didn’t.

I pictured myself running around the chicken run trying to spray the chickens’ bottoms.

I had an idea though. At night when they are roosting, they sit on the roost on their haunches. They bend their legs and lower themselves, and their feet lock in place.

I figured that would give me time to spray them before they stood up and freaked out.

So I decided to spray them at night while they were in the wooden shed where they roosted. The shed had a wooden branch crosswise a few feet off the ground in it, and the chickens roosted on that.

Around dusk they would walk into the shed and walk around a bit inside and then fly up onto the roost.

The shed was what was called an ark – a low building with a pitched roof like a tiny house.

At one end was the box where they laid their eggs and at the other end was a small ramp where they entered the ark and a door so that I could get in from time to time to clean it out.

So after they were settled in for the night I crept into the ark and got my aerosol spray can ready to go up and down the line of chickens’ bottoms, spraying.

I don’t recall but I guess I had a torch with me so I could see what I was doing.

What I do remember is what happened.

I was lucky in that they were sleeping in a line all facing the same way, and away from me.

I figured I had a minute or so while the chickens woke up and stood erect so they could release their grip on the roosting branch and fly up in the air. I pictured a shed full of panicking chickens with feathers flying everywhere.

What I didn’t take into account was that the spray was ice cold when it came out of the pressurized can.

Nor was I ready for their reaction. Those chickens couldn’t have been more pleased.

They each raised their bottoms in slow motion and waggled them into the path of the spray, emitting the chicken equivalent of a low moan of pleasure.

And I worked my way along the row, working to the tune of their little moans.

‘The Road Not Taken’ – a poem by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Some years ago I met someone who had studied this poem at university. He thought that Frost was mocking himself. I hadn’t looked at the poem much and didn’t do so then. I said something or other in reply – and I defended ‘the road less travelled’ probably because it is the more romantic and adventurous road.

Being aware of my defensiveness on that occasion made me look at the poem again, recently.

The Road Not Taken

So, he stood a while thinking about which road to take. And for a reason that was part of his makeup he decided to take the lesser road, precisely because it was the lesser road.

And having taken it, now he sees that a long time in the future when he is old, he will say that taking that path made all the difference and he will say it with a sigh.

Why a sigh? After all, he is seeing all this having taken the road.

Will he sigh because it doesn’t matter which path he takes, ever?

Will he sigh because once again he spent too much time thinking about paths?

Will he sigh because he feels the weight of his own makeup leading him down wrong paths?

He believes he can’t turn back – he explained already how ‘way leads on to way’ – that there are consequences and that when a fateful move it made, there is no going back.

Is that even right that one cannot turn back

I don’t have to be so literal. Frost is a poet. It doesn’t have to be an actual wood. The wood can be a metaphor for life. And the paths can be paths between any choices. A choice to get fit or not to get fit. To take a job in a bank or become an artist. To get off here or continue to the usual bus stop. The list is endless.

When my wife Tamara was reading H Is For Hawk by Helen MacDonald, the story of the author’s life with a goshawk, she asked me whether I knew the meaning of the word, creance, which she had read about in the book.

I didn’t but I guessed that it might mean the act of behaving well. I guessed it from miscreant, which is the name of course for someone who does wrong.

Tamara told me that a creance is the long piece of cord that a trainer uses to maintain control of a hawk in training.

It got me thinking that there may be a connection with miscreant, so I looked up the etymology of the word.

And it turns out that a micreant is not only a wrongdoer but also someone who lacks faith.

And creance, which originated in the late 15th century comes from the French word créance which mean ‘faith’ – and describes the cord used to retain a bird of peu de créance – of little faith – a bird which cannot yet be relied upon to return to its handler.

I got my chickens at about five months old if I remember correctly. I do remember they were called ‘point of lay’ – so whatever age that is, that’s when I got them.

They laid fairly regularly and better in the summer months, so we put the eggs we didn’t use in a bucket of Isinglass, which is the trade name for sodium silicate.

It coats the egg and prevents air getting in and they can be stored that way for several months, or in other words, through those leaner winter months.

After a couple of years the chickens stopped laying so regularly and I had to think of what to do with them.

I visited a man in the next village who had a large piece of scrub land, and he put all his older chickens there and let them live out their lives. He fed them vegetable scraps but for the most part they fended for themselves. Some of his chickens were ten years old.

His solution was a good one but I didn’t have a piece of spare ground I could put my chickens. But I did have a solution.

About ten miles from where I lived, deep in the Norfolk countryside there was a small zoo that specialized in animals that were native, or once were native, to the English countryside.

The zoo was well laid out with space for the animals – with one exception, which was the wolves that paced restlessly in figures of eight around their compound – but that’s another story.

And there were lots of chickens scrabbling in the dirt and wandering around freely all over the zoo, so I figured that a few extra would not be noticed. I could have asked the zoo staff, but I was young and I didn’t want to be rejected because I didn’t have a plan B.

So I drove out to the zoo with the chickens in the back of my van and when I got there I parked down a narrow lane and lofted the chickens one by one over the high hedge that bordered the zoo.

Chickens don’t mind being lofted into the air because they are very good at fluttering and they let themselves down easy.

And it was funny to see them go up into the air and then start flapping their wings as they ran out of upward thrust, and disappear on the other side of the hedge.

Once they were all lofted over the hedge I drove around to the car park, paid the very small entrance fee and went in to see how my chickens were getting on.

I had visions of them scrabbing about in the dirt and wandering loosely mixed in with the other chickens. I had my eyes ready to spot them. And then I saw them. They were hard up against the hedge looking like the soon to be victims of the St Valentine’s Day massacre waiting to be gunned down.

Far from blending in, they stood out like a sore thumb with wide-eyed, surprised looks in their faces. No one could fail to see they were foreign, intruder chickens – wonderfully red-brown Rhode Island Red, plump intruder chickens.

Except that no one looked at them or cared that they were there.  No one except their paranoid ex-owner half looking at them, trying not to draw attention to them. I probably looked as wide-eyed as they did.