The Egg and I by Betty McDonald

Author:Betty McDonald [McDonald, Betty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-05-29T07:00:00+00:00

I kept all of the egg records. I wrote on a large calendar in the kitchen the number of eggs we gathered at each gathering. At the end of the day these figures were entered in a daybook and later entered in a weekly column, along with the feed, which was delivered once a week. It was a very simple system, but when it came time to draw weekly and monthly percentages I was apt to find the hens in the throes of a 150 per cent lay and then I would have to go laboriously back and try to find out how far back and in which branch of my arithmetic, adding, multiplication or subtraction, the trouble lay.

The percentage of cockerels was a vital factor in determining the cost of each pullet, and I watched the baby chicks with beating heart for the first signs of the little combs which would tell me how we stood. As soon as we could tell them apart, we separated the cockerels and put them in fattening pens where they ate and fought and crowed until it was time to dress them for market. Anything else that I had cared for from birth would have become so embedded in my feelings I would have had to gouge it out, but I got so I actually enjoyed watching Bob stick his killing knife deep into the palates of fifty cockerels and hang them up to bleed. My only feeling was pride to see how firm and fat they were as we dressed them for market.

I got so I could dress chickens like an expert, but have wondered since how this ability to defeather a chicken in about two minutes without once tearing the skin, my only accomplishment, could ever be mentioned socially along with swimming and diving, or gracefully demonstrated as with violin and piano playing. Wouldn't you know that I would excel in chicken picking?

About the time the cockerels were ready for market, the pullets were ready to be taught to roost in their own little houses instead of in the trees, where they were easy prey for owls and wildcats. This meant that at dusk each night Bob and I had to go through the orchard plucking squawking, flapping birds out of the tops of the trees, holding them by the ankles with heads down. When we had as large a bouquet as we could hold, we took them to the pullet houses and planted them firmly on the roosts. At first I felt like a falconer and found the work rather exhilarating, but after about two weeks, when there was still a large group of boneheads who preferred to sleep out of doors and get killed, I found myself inclining toward the you've-made-your-bed-now-lie-in-it attitude.

Chickens are so dumb. Any other living thing which you fed 365 days in the year would get to know and perhaps to love you. Not the chicken. Every time I opened the chicken house door, SQUAWK, SQUAWK-SQUAAAAAAAAWK! And the dumbbells would fly up in the air and run around and bang into each other.

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