Do not fear for me. Make straight your own path to destiny.
--Sophocles, Antigone
Do you know why the Egyptians didn't have a chicken goddess? Even though they had a
cat and
crocodile and a
hippo and a
baboon? It's because they never knew a chicken like Antigone.
It all started twenty years ago, when my son and I were living in relatively rural Washington State on five acres with my then-husband. We had a friend whom I shall call Matt because it's not his name. Everyone has a friend like Matt. Loyal, generous, brilliant, talented, and with all the discerning judgment of an Irish Setter puppy.
One day Matt showed up with a whole lot of about-to-hatch eggs, which he said were chicken eggs, and a primitive incubator. He'd gotten the whole outfit cheap from some back alley black market egg purveyor. As far as we could figure out, all it took was a hissed, "Hey, wanna buy some eggs? Cheap?" and he realized what our lives had been missing. Not his life. He said he didn't have room at his place.
Two weeks later we had three baby turkeys, a whole bunch of fluffy white bred-for-meat chickens, a few bantams, and a bunch of egg laying type chickens, at least a third of which turned out to be hens.
We kept the non-bantam chickens in three chicken tractors I built myself. Chicken tractors are moveable chicken coops. Mine were primitive. They looked like this:
-- except mine had perches running longways for the chickens to sit on.
Of course, our chickens were only kept in the tractors at night. Otherwise they roamed free. This meant that every night we had to go out and put the chickens in the tractors so they wouldn't become raccoon hors d'eouvres. At dusk they would sit on the edge of the open tractor but they would NOT jump down onto the perch. It's a chicken thing. We're moving to relatively rural Southern California in a couple months and I'm about to build another tractor. Completely different design. It will allow the chickens to go UP to get into it.
Anyway, there was a messy period of a month or two while Matt butchered the meat chickens (hideous, but the poor things were engineered for such enormous white-meat breasts they were unable even to walk as they got older) and we gave away lots of roosters.
Then we got to a fairly stable state. The roosters (we still had five, which was four too many) still harassed the hens and attacked my son, who was five, and his friends. But the hens settled in and laid zillions of eggs.
We ate lots of the eggs, but we let some hatch. Those baby chickens grew up. Gradually our flock got to be mostly black with red highlights from the Rhode Island Red influence.
And from the first generation native to our place came a million dollar chicken, the avian equivalent of Joan of Arc, a Boadicea, a veritable Daenerys Targaryen. She was named Antigone not because I've read it (I haven't) but because of Maurice Sagoff's Shrinklits version:
Tyrant Creon’s stern advice is
“Do not bury Polyneices!”
Thebes’ defenders had to squash him –
Now we’ll let the buzzards nosh him!”
But Antigone, the brave,
Dared to dig her brother’s grave:
“Man-made laws my soul defies –
I live by laws divine!” she cries...
She looked quite a bit (i.e. exactly) like the other black-with-red-highlights hens. Here she probably is on the left with a friend, center, and another friend, right:
But in real life you never mistook Antigone for any of her sisters. For one thing, she would have nothing to do with the bestial rutting practiced by the roosters (spend five minutes with a rooster and you will see how "cock" got its secondary meaning). If one of them approached with any such notion, she promptly ran to the nearest human and hid behind his feet. All humans, at least all hippie humans, react the same way in this scenario. They wave their arms and yell "Get away!" to the offending rooster. I don't know what she did when there weren't any humans around, but she was a hen of infinite resource.
She did have a rooster friend, Mr. Multicolored Egg Layer, but he was JUST a friend:
Antigone terrorized our dogs (Old English Sheepdogs, not the sharpest needles in the pincushion) by leaping at them and squawking and flapping her feathers in their faces. She went her own way, wandering around without the flock most of the time. She even disdained the chicken tractors at night. The other chickens, no matter where they went during the day (usually as a group) always came and perched on the edges at dusk. Antigone on the other hand headed for the house a couple hundred yards away by a twisty path through blackberry bushes, made her way up to the second floor balcony, and perched there.
Like many heroes, she died on the field of battle, taking on a foe much bigger than she was. I found her near the house. I suspect it wasn't a raccoon, but Matt's Rottweiler (he won him in a raffle, exactly the kind of thing that always happens to Matts), a gentle dog to humans but without a lot of restraint where feathery things were concerned. We buried her with ceremony and full honors at sunset. I only hope I see her like again one day.
I have been a stranger here in my own land: All my life
--Antigone