What a morning!
One of our favorite girls, Penelope, a Partridge Rock from our original flock, was not in the coop last night. We looked everywhere we could in the dark. It got dark and cold pretty quickly last night. What happened? We had not heard anything out of the ordinary. Though life with chickens is seldom ordinary, one does become accustomed to their day to day racket.
We do free-range our chickens. Our back yard has a massive amount of tall grasses and weeds. So much so that I guess we really can't call it a yard - truly more like the back forty. Ok, so the back six! Anything could come through the tall brush or along the creek, snatch a chicken and be gone. But, that just didn't seem likely. We have been lucky. Luckier than I would have thought. We haven't lost any flock members to predators since our first month of novice chicken-keeping last year. (knocking wood!)
I was in a fowl mood last night. I was mad and sad that one of our good girls was gone. As grumpy as I was I still had hope. I asked the chicken deities for mercy on my sweet girl. When I did sleep, my dreams were pretty wacky. I don't like loss. Not that anyone does actually like loss, but I take even the smallest loss sometimes too much to heart. Well, maybe except that time I sent a poor songbird to her death... of course I feel bad about it, but mostly I laugh about the incident. For now I'll just say that it involved my "saving" this poor little bird. And my cat. Yeah, the cat was there too.
Anyways, ever-hopeful, I checked each window at first light. I kept checking windows. While the coffee was brewing I decided to take a quick check outside. Still in my bathrobe, with no socks and leaky hiking shoes, I did a inner perimeter search. Nothing. I was chilled and shivering and cranky. I came back in and continued with my morning routine.. for about 12 minutes. I got dressed and took a last swig of coffee. Hubby could feel my urgency and followed suite. We got bundled up and fitted ourselves with our re-con gear. Me, a long stick. Him, his 410. We were ready for whatever we found. We searched and searched. We searched for well over an hour. So, after searching high and low, up and down the stream bed, in and out of the briars, under the cars and buildings, we decided to come back to home base.
We let the chickens out of the chicken coop. We were hoping against hope that somehow, maybe, we had missed her during head-count last night. No such luck.
We stayed out with our feather-babies for quite some time - admiring their antics and lamenting the loss of our beautiful hen, all the while planning our course for revenge. Yeah, yeah... critters gotta eat, too. But, we're not getting into that discussion now.
Soaked and chilled we decided to come back inside to finish our now cold coffee. Thankfully, before I had gotten too far into the warming up process I remembered that the chickens needed more water. So, I filled the gallon water jug and back out I went.
Like nothing had happened, like no sleep had been lost and like no hour long search had been mounted, like we hadn't been calling Penelope's name all morning long - there, happily scratching away in front of the porch steps, was Penelope. What the hell?!
I guess if a chicken doesn't want to be found, a chicken won't be found!
