The Day Mama Shot The Bird Peter B. Steiger 08/18/2004 I discovered a wonderful cure for the blues today. It turns out that nothing gets you out of the dumps like a good, old-fashioned bloodbath. As part of our ongoing effort to convince ourselves that we aren't really nerds-out-of-water in a hopeless quest to live in the country, we have been raising chickens. Our primary goal is to raise a breed from stock that predates genetic engineering, so-called "heirloom chickens" that are exactly the same, genetically, as the chickens our pioneer forebears bore forth as they trudged through the wild frontier without so much as a good DVD player. But demand for the breed we chose ("Java" chickens, apparently so named because the pioneers who raised them were website designers) was high and we would have to wait until late summer to see our chicks, so we decided we would start a practice herd of chickens from the farm supply store. These are also heirloom chickens too, but not as hard to get as Java chickens... maybe HTML chickens or something. Since this first batch is not intended to be bred, we didn't want any roosters; just lots of egg-laying ladies who will keep quiet at 6 in the morning. We didn't do too badly, either - out of 17 chickens, only 2 turned out to be stallions. They started crowing a couple of weeks ago and haven't shut up since. What's worse, they chase the girls around constantly, and the ladies have made it clear that they are NOT that easy, although they are certainly cheep. So, we held a tribunal and condemned the two roosters to death. One of them must have overheard us; within a week he took his own life or died of some mystery ailment and we had to bury him in the growing Critter Cemetery that already houses two skunks. The other one enjoyed the benefits of busy schedules and roasting hot afternoons that drained us of any interest in plucking birds. That, and the fact that as always we have no idea what we're doing. Sylvia made it clear from the start that she had no intention of getting bird blood all over her or otherwise putting her hands in a chicken corpse, but she was willing to get some library books so our teenage daughter could learn to do all the hard work. Actually both kids seemed a little TOO eager to do the carving; their eyes grew wide and they cackled with glee whenever the subject came up. Today, at last, was the big day. We have been waffling for weeks whether an adult or child should deliver the killing blow, and it got right up to the point where Irene was aiming her little hatchet when she chickened out (thank you! you're a wonderful audience!) and we all agreed the end might not be as swift and painless as possible for our future dinner. Besides which, the wind had picked up like nobody's business, which we never expect to happen in Wyoming, and the chicken hanging from its feet was blowing around like a kite. Instead, Sylvia pulled out her trusty .22 Ruger pistol, held the bird more or less still on the end of its rope, and put a hole through the head that pretty much eliminated any concern that it could feel any pain from that point forward. For those of you who are wondering, yes chickens really do continue to flap around after they are lacking a brain - or the entire head. This probably gave much confusion to the kittens and our dog watching from the kitchen window. In any case, at least I got to scold Sylvia for teaching the children bad manners by shooting the bird in front of them. That was all we were going to contribute to the carnage, and carnage it was. We turned Irene loose with the hatchet; in a mere 30 minutes she had that head off (boy was I glad we went for the gun first). By this time the wind was really howling, so Irene packed up the blood-soaked plywood that was her work surface, chicken, and all and carried the mess into her bathtub (I barred them from my bathroom on the grounds that I don't want chicken guts mixed in with my bubble bath tonight). While I took an endless stream of pictures with our digital camera, Irene set to work skinning the now headless bird. Since we don't eat the skin anyway, the book recommended just taking skin and feathers off like a big glove. Daniel provided his pocket knife for the operation. The scene was something you rarely witness in a children's bathroom. Blood and feathers strewn everywhere around the bathtub, Irene cheerfully admiring her work as she whacked away at wings and legs, and over all of this the stink of a full cat box right next to where she was kneeling. Then of course there was her father, hovering overhead and climbing over the bathroom fixtures to get the best angle for a closeup of maximum gore. The kittens occasionally came in to sniff the strange new smells, but they were content with their cat food when they got hungry. Was Irene, a sensitive, bookish girl of 15, at all disturbed by her own butchery? To that I can only add two decisions she made during her work. The first was to celebrate the successful removal of the wings by holding them over her shoulders and dancing around the bathroom singing "I can fly! I can fly!" The second was when she finished stripping off all the meat and could easily have dumped the carcass into the trash without ever glimpsing the nasty bits hidden inside the skeleton. Instead, she chose to puncture the peritoneal cavity and fish around the intestines just to satisfy her curiosity. This isn't my daughter the computer nerd; this is my daughter the mad butcher of Cheyenne who can simultaneously vivisect a chicken and recite the value of pi to 179 decimal places. Hey, that's what we can have for dinner - chicken pot pi!