Another nighttime chicken emergency: once again, loud squawking outside the front door had us out in the dark, in the summertime, in our underwear. Flashing our big spotlights into the trees near the house, we spotted a large Barred owl as it took off from a tree limb and flew out of the light. A Bantam rooster soon tumbled from the limb, sprawled on the ground near our feet and started running in tight circles. Its head was strangely cocked over its back and flapped in an alarmingly non-natural way.

“I think it’s neck is broken,” Anni breathed. I stood there and tried to say something or react in some useful way, but I couldn’t think of what to do. I’d never seen the proverbial “chicken running around with its head cut off” and I must admit, it was a horrific sight.

We finally got organized and decided we needed to put the poor rooster out of its misery. Anni suggested that we whack it with a shovel and she headed over to the barn. I called out for her to bring the hoe instead.

So then we had to decide who was gonna do the deed. We each had perfectly good reasons why the other needed to be the executioner. Meanwhile, the rooster was still scrambling around, even as its vocalizations were getting more faint.

We had to act fast and quit talking about it, the poor rooster was suffering. I said I’d do it but only if I used a pistol. So Anni went in and got the old .22 revolver I’d been given by a family member. The thing was horribly inaccurate and as I popped away at the rooster, shot after shot went astray. Seriously, you could stand four feet away from a paper plate, aim and miss the thing.

The more I missed, the more I got pissed. Anni wasn’t helping with her dry observations about the usefulness of my Army weapons training and my fancy shooting badges. The situation was getting grim. Luckily, the rooster was getting weaker and moving slow enough that I could get closer and place a shot point-blank.

It fell to Anni to dispose of the rooster as she saw fit, I was done for the night. I took my shaky self into the house and went to bed, after making a mental note to clean that crappy pistol the next day. Or maybe throw it away.

We kept several weapons on hand. Target practice was a good idea and fun too.

The whole issue of our “failure” to protect the domestic fowl on the property was coming to a head, but we honestly didn’t have a ready answer for it. My frustration level grew each time we experienced an incident but, beyond rounding up all the flock and giving them away, we were caught up in a paradigm. And it didn’t help that K would call us several times during the year to inquire about how his wife’s chickens were faring! We felt like we had to hang in there, to do our best and after that, well, it was up to the lake gods.