It’s true, ya know. I learned from experience today. Fortunately for Julia, my better judgment caught me before I actually tried to catch the chicken with her in my arms!
Julia and I were playing in her room when I heard the distinct sound of a chicken being chased. I didn’t think much of it because I know that the people who live behind us have chickens. I just thought, ‘Hmm, that sounds really close, closer than usual.’ Well, it kept going and didn’t diminish in volume. So, I decided to check it out.
Sure enough…Eli was chasing a black hen in our back yard. Eli was loving it! He chases chickens every chance he gets when Steve takes him for a run.
My first thought was, ‘Oh, cool. I can show Julia how a dog chases a chicken. Won’t this be fun!’
Then, I realized that this chicken belongs to someone and might even be part of their livelihood. I better not let Eli kill it. ‘Eli, NO! Sit, Eli. Eli! Sit!’ Yeah, right! Ok, how do I keep Eli from killing then hen while I catch it? Then, how do I get it back to it’s owners? The people that it belongs to live on the other side of our 15ft. rock wall with 2ft. of barbed wire on top of it! Yikes! Well, I’ll have to catch the chicken before Eli does, that’s for sure. Ok, Let’s corner this poor girl. Luckily, I have caught a few chickens before, so I knew how to catch one…we owned some in Africa. As I started toward the bird and Eli came at her too, her tone changed. Her squawk became a deeper, more perilous screech.
Ok, here we go Julia. ‘Uh, nope. That’s not gonna work. You can’t catch a chicken while holding a baby. Go put Julia down and then come back for the chicken.’ Thank you, Lord, for giving me some common sense. Just then, I heard a young man call out to me in Indonesian, ‘Ma’am, can you just throw the chicken over here?’ I looked in the direction of the voice, which was up and behind me. There was a young man in the tree that hangs over the wall a bit. It was the son of the people who owned the chicken. ‘Ok, ya, sure. Just a minute.’
So, I left the chicken and Eli in the back yard, praying that Eli wouldn’t catch it while I was in the house. I put Julia down and she promptly started crying. ‘Sorry, honey, this is for your own safety. I’ll be back in few minutes.’ It’s hard to leave your 3 month old when she is crying because she just wants to be held, but knowing that it was for her own good made it more bearable.
Back in the yard, Eli was walking around the fire pit, but there was no chicken to be seen. ‘OH, NO! Eli, please tell me you didn’t..’ I looked up in the tree to see if the neighbor boy was still there and if he had seen the events while I was gone. He wasn’t there. Then he called out from farther down on his neighbors porch which is higher up because we live on a hill. He pointed to where the chicken was. I looked at where he pointed…in the fire pit which was covered with branches that hadn’t been burned yet. I didn’t see anything.
Then suddenly, as if looking into one of those crazy pictures where the image pops out at you, I saw the black hen sitting snuggly in the safety of the branches. That was some pretty good camouflage. I began lifting branches ot get to her. She scurried to another patch of branches as soon as I got enough off of her that I could start to reach her. That process repeated a couple of times. Finally, I got to her before she moved. As I was gently pulling her out, Eli began to bite at her tail feathers! ‘No Eli, No!’ He just didn’t understand. Why couldn’t he get a hold of it? I was holding it? Why couldn’t he?
So, I got the bird out and walked over to the wall nearest to the neighbor’s porch. The neighbor boy and his mother where there encouraging me to throw the hen over the wall.
Here goes! I pulled her back and down to do a granny throw up and over the wall. I threw her up into the air and watched as she began to flap her wings, but was about 3 ft. short of clearing the wall. Now if you remember the dimensions of the wall, that means that she missed the barbed wire and smacked into the rock head first. Fortunately she wasn’t going very fast. She fell to the ground and got up running from Eli. The neighbors said, ‘Just wait, my mom will come to your front gate.’ Obviously, he didn’t want his hen bashed up and he could see that I really can’t throw very well. When people say, “You throw like a girl!” That girl they are talking about is me. ;)
I chased the chicken around a bit more and finally got Eli to go one way around the fire pit while I went the other. I grabbed her again and held her up out of Eli’s reach as I walked to the front gate. Trip, our other dog, had been oblivious to whole situation because he was in the front yard. When he heard us coming and he smelled the hen, he became very interested. So, now I had 2 dogs jumping up trying to get at this poor bird.
Finally, the neighbor lady came around the corner and I handed her the chicken through the gate. She didn’t want me to open the gate because she was afraid of our dogs. She stood back as far as she could and stretched out one hand to grab the hen by it’s feet and backed up before saying thank you and hurrying away.
The dogs watched in bewilderment as the lady walked down the street. They looked at me as if to ask why I had given the chicken away.
I rinsed my hands off at the spigot and then went inside to get some soap…don’t want to get bird flu. (No one here has had it and no animals have been found to have it here either.) When I went inside, I heard Julia still crying. Aww, poor baby! She would have been much worse off if I had tried to catch the chicken with her in one arm, though!
