Every person alive has some things they are not proud of that they have done in their life. It is, after all, part of the human experience.
I have a lot of them, many of which I will never reveal in a column or even on my death bed.
With the hunting season going on, I am always reminded why I have never been into that sport. It’s about something that happened when I was about eight years old. To this day only two people have known about it, and one was my father who passed away a dozen years ago. The other is a friend who moved away when we were kids, who lives somewhere on the East Coast as an old guy like me. I haven’t talked to him for over 50 years.
It concerned a rooster that used to hang around our farm. This was no ordinary rooster. He was one mean bird. He arrived one day walking down the irrigation ditch, chasing one of our dogs. Now our dogs were not junk yard grade dogs, but they could be pretty tough. However, once the rooster we eventually named “Chasey Chicken” arrived, feathers took the throne as ruler of the barnyard, not fur.
{{tncms-inline content=”<p>This was no ordinary rooster. He was one mean bird. He arrived one day walking down the irrigation ditch, chasing one of our dogs.</p>” id=”f1435e03-01c8-4b33-b968-2945c2a2c563″ style-type=”quote” title=”Pull Quote 1″ type=”relcontent”}}
Chasey Chicken had apparently been trained to be a fighter, something that was more common in those days. Why he wandered west to our place none of us knew, but arrive he did. You know kind of like the drifter in an old B movie that shows up in a dusty cowboy town and causes trouble. The rooster’s first statement, after defrocking the dogs in the barnyard, was when he tried to attack my mother, who was going to the root cellar for some potatoes for dinner. She had just picked up some spuds and started to walk up the stairs from that hole in the ground when the rooster jumped on her back. She started to scream, and he dug his claws into her. She somehow got free of him and got a big stick that was standing nearby and knocked him over so she could run away. He gave chase but was too late to catch her.
She was infuriated and told my dad. The funny thing was that my dad just kind of, well, laughed. The rooster never gave him a bad time and despite what we had told him about its antics, he just thought what we were saying was a little over the top. That rooster was like a bad kid who seemed perfectly fine to his parents but was really a terror to everyone else.
A vicious attack
One day I was in the hay barn and I can’t remember what I was doing, but he flew up to the loft where I was. He went after me beak and claws. I tried to put a bale of hay between us, but I was all of eight years old and the bales weighed a lot more than I did. I had on brand new heavy duty leather work shoes my parents had bought me and his claws went right through them. By some miracle I did not incur a scratch from that encounter. I finally got on top of a stack of hay in the barn and was able to roll a bale down from about five rows above him which knocked the breath out of the bird. I ran home before he could recover. I told my mom and she tried to convince my dad that the slits in my shoes were from the rooster, but my father just didn’t seem to want to do anything about the animal.
So, since the sheriff in town would not do anything about the outlaw, my friend and I became vigilantes.
Planning the ambush
We planned it out carefully. Chasey Chicken would patrol the barnyard and the adjacent hay field almost every hour. It was like timing a guard on his rounds at a prison’s grounds. He would walk around chasing anything that came into view; other birds, cats (who feared him more than the dogs did) and critters of all kinds. I even saw him tangle with a skunk one evening, and he won without getting sprayed. So after knowing his routine we lured him into a trap. While he was on the other side of the farm strutting around head held high, we spread some grain on the ground right in his path directly below a small tree house I had built with some of my friends. BB guns in hand, we climbed the ladder and waited for him to show up.
{{tncms-inline alignment=”left” content=”<p>While the bird was a mean machine, I had no right to do what I did. It was a lesson well learned. It is probably the reason, as much as I like guns, I never have been a hunter.</p>” id=”d37412d4-629c-4164-82b2-e9be3a259f82″ style-type=”quote” title=”Pull Quote” type=”relcontent”}}
BB guns were a part of life on the farm. I used to shoot it all the time at posts, bottles and cans. In fact I still have that old Daisy, but the guts are gone, disappearing over the years as it deteriorated in my dad’s garage until after he died and I found it in the rafters. But from early on I was never one to shoot live things. New in my hands, I once shot it into a flock of starlings that were above me and somehow I hit one and it fell to the ground. Seeing death on a farm is a common thing, but it was usually by incidence of old age or disease. I killed a bird. I cried so hard because this wasn’t like squashing a bug to me; it was a living thing that was much more like my dog or horse. I swore I would never kill anything again.
But that rooster made me mad. He had taken over my personal farm playground to the point that I could not do anything without looking over my shoulder for him. So we sat and waited and in about 15 minutes here he came. He saw the grain and headed right for it. We started shooting at him. At the time I pictured us as the good guys in the old barn in a western, shooting at the bad guys through the slits in the side of the building. (Like that old barn wood would have ever protected us if someone was shooting back.) Neither of us were too good of shots and most of the BBs missed. But a few found their mark and Chasey Chicken flinched and jumped. But not one BB penetrated that miserable bird’s hide. He just got mad and tried to jump up after us. We were making noise and taunting him. He got madder and madder. Suddenly I realized that while we had not really hurt him much, what we were doing was wrong. I told my friend to stop firing. We just watched him try to get up the tree after us. Pretty soon he wandered away like nothing had ever happened. I felt terrible and we swore to each other that we would never tell anyone what we did.
However, that night my dad came in the house after milking cows and asked what I had done to the rooster. He had not seen us pelting that bird with BBs, but somehow he knew. I had never seen him so mad up to that point in my life. How he figured it out I will never know for sure, but I felt bad. So I admitted to the deed and started to cry. While the bird was a mean machine, I had no right to do what I did. It was a lesson well learned. It is probably the reason, as much as I like guns, I never have been a hunter. Yup, I am one of those people who can eat meat as long as I don’t have to kill the animal it comes from myself.
Pitiful, huh.
But there was one good thing that came from all of it. The rooster never bothered me or my mom again. I don’t know what transpired, but its attitude changed. However the dogs still feared him. They would still hide in their houses when he came strutting by.
I was only hit once by my dad in my whole life. I sassed my mom and he slapped me on the face. He was a very patient man. That day I think he probably wanted to use a 2 x 4 on me, but I think he saw my remorse and realized it had been a lesson. As far as I know he never told my mother about it. Forty years later as an adult I mentioned it to him and asked him how he knew what we had done. He just said that he noticed a change in the rooster’s spirit and he figured something had happened. Then he said he should have not taken what my mother and I had told him about the bird so lightly. He always seemed proud of me as a kid, except for that one time, and the disappointment I had caused in him has stuck with me the rest of my life.
As for Chasey Chicken, he eventually disappeared, leaving the farm, never to be seen again. It was like the ending to that B western movie I have mentioned. He just strutted off into the sunset.
So that’s the skinny on Chasey Chicken, why I don’t hunt and how great a dad I had. I pretty much only remember the good things that went on when I was a kid, but that one incident, initiated by me, is a black mark I will never forget, nor in fact, want to forget.
The ambush of Chasey Chicken, or how I lost interest in hunting
Rick Shaw