the marked hen

this is not a story for the faint of heart

here on west wind farm there live about 25 mature hens who lay about 25 eggs every single day. in a separate coop there reside about the same number of 3-month old chicks (who are black and blue and slightly brown and haven't grown their red gobble gobbles on their heads), who will replace the others when they become too old (they're near the end of their lives).
russell, the 22 year old from seattle who came to these lands 4 months ago and has decided he will never leave, is the master of the hens. he feeds them, collects their eggs, and spends good time with the chicks, allowing them to become accustomed to the human touch.
about two weeks ago, russell began noticing queer occurences in the coop. at least one, if not as many as 3, eggs were broken each dusk as he went in to collect them. who was the culprit? the mystery continued...
until last week, russell walked into the coop and saw a hen run out of the wall of nests, with a shell and bit of yolk on her beak. she was caught red handed.

quickly she was moved out of the mature hens coop and into the pen with the younger hens where she could not eat any more eggs. but she kept getting back into her old coop, the wily one. she was then splattered in blue paint, for us to more easily identify the disrupter of order on the farm. since then she has remained with the younger ones.

and there are still more gruesome facts... it seems she is teaching the young chicks of her ways; by laying eggs and pecking at them. the young chicks have never seen eggs before and now, it is feared, all they know is to peck at them until they break.

something must be done about the marked hen. it is russell's mission (a directive from peter, master of the lands) to get rid of her. most likely by outsourcing her death to a neighbor who will find some unsavory use for her tough body.

she will be remembered by the few as a boundary-breaking, devil-may-care, rebel with an unknown cause who was murdered for her beliefs.

rest in peace, marked hen.


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edit at 3:07pm:
russell dutifully placed the hen in a dog crate and about 10 minutes ago coleman (the neighbor) came by with his dogs in the bed of his truck, placed the hen in with them, and rode away. her body will be too tough to eat plain-- she will have to be boiled or put in a stew in order to be tasty. i told peter i hoped i wouldn't get carted away if i started drinking my menstrual blood and he said if people found out, i just might. but then again no one harvests my blood to sell at saturday markets for $4/dozen. this is so fucked up... she is being killed for eating her own eggs (she laid and ate another one today). apparently with chickens these days it's actually bred out of them to fuck. there is a rooster here who lives with 25 hens and only rarely does one of them actually guard her egg and take care of it (it's called brooding) because she knows it's fertilized.
maybe we will have a little ceremony tonight for her by the fire.