Crisis on the homestead - the Chickens have been eaten!

Another visit and my client is still not answering the door so I don’t know whether I’ll have any more work to worry about by the end of the week. Strangely after all the worry and stress and saying that I’m not ready to be away from Morgan I really don’t want to give it up. I need to feel like I can do something for somebody who isn’t intimately related to me – not exactly a selfish impulse but perhaps a proud one. I’ve never thought of being a mother as “just” anything but still I want to be useful at something else as well, just for a short while for a few hours a month.

Ah well, out of my hands I guess.

Today we had an awful shock that overwrites anything else I thought I wanted to say. We had a fox come in the night and the coop side door wasn’t properly shut and the rest is history. It wasn’t gory or terrible, and I expected to feel much more upset by it when/if we found them lying there half-eaten… I was more gutted for Jenna than anything.

She cried of course, and said that the naughty fox should have been told a lesson by its mummy not to eat her friends. She also said, jokingly I think, that if the fox comes back in our garden Daddy will smack its bottom (!). Lastly she told me not to worry, that she wouldn’t let the fox get me, and that Delia and Pippin are in heaven now. Rather than discuss the theology of that with her at her age, I just gave her a hug.

She wanted to see the bodies, and not seeing the point in shielding her from death I did. I didn’t let her see the wounds on the bodies though – or the fact that Pippin was missing her head. I really really don’t want her to be the one to find it… Guess I should alert the neighbours too.

Morgan was fascinated – as if this was a game that her feathery friends were playing and she was waiting for the joke, for them to leap up and peck at her fingers while she laughed like only a baby can. After a few minutes Jenna went back inside (shouting, “byebye chickens!”) and although she’s subdued she doesn’t seem too miserable. She won’t let me hug her again though.

The coop will have to be empty now until the spring time when we can buy some new hens. It’s strange and empty and I keep getting up to check on them as I type, or thinking I can hear them clucking in impatience wanting to be let out. I really miss them, and it has only been a day. They were part of my life, in just a few short months.