The Life-Saving Virtues of Super Glue
or Snow White and the Seventh Clucker
I married Snow White. Or at least I married a beautifully blonde, effervescent version of Snow White. Which is to say my wife loves animals. Since marrying my wife, we’ve had the following in our care:
3 dogs (a Puggle, a Newfoundland, and a Basset Hound)
7 cats (2 indoor and five barn)
1 African spurred tortoise (approximately 75 pounds)
5 Holland Lops
25 hens (of different breeds)
4 roosters
Too many fish to count
2 Percheron draft horses
And 1 unofficial bat who lives in the cable box (not to be confused with the bats who squatted in our eaves)
My wife loves all the pets. I do, too, but not for the same reason. She loves to take care of things, to nurture them and love them. I love that they’re conversation pieces, an endless parade of weird, unusual, and funny stories. Case in point:
One rainy Thursday night in December, we crawled into bed early because we were flying out of town the next day for a wedding. We started raising chickens that spring, and we had a flock of seven:
Cluck Norris
Goldie Hen
Larry Bird
The Duchess of Yolk 2.0 (The O.G. Duchess of Yolk didn’t make it past a few weeks, story for another time)
Bob
Egghead
And Chuckles
Left: Bob’s big ass. Right: Chuckles.
I named the first five. My kids named the last two. You can tell because the first five names are awesome, and the last two are lame. Naming animals is clearly a skill uninformed by genetics.
Disregarding the two terrible chicken handles, raising the chicks in the incubator, building the coop, hand feeding worms to the flock, clipping their wings—all the chicken husbandry—had been nothing but rewarding.
The joy was most palpable in my wife. She would lead the flock out of the coop to scratch and peck and forage in our rose garden and in the ivy that crawled at the base of my treehouse.
When it was time to wrangle them, she’d walk from the front of our yard to the coop and call out, “Here, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick… Here, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick…” All seven chickens would sprint after her, anticipating treats.
A chicken on the run looks like a morbidly obese bingo player with two fistfuls of pantaloons who’s doing everything she can to maintain her dignity and keep from flashing her dimpled chicken ass. I’ve been to the Louvre, the Musée D’Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, the Vatican, and the Smithsonian—still nothing captures the artistic essence of shameless desire like a flock of chickens in fifth gear.
We were sleeping well that night. Keep your Advil PM and your fentanyl—give me rain in the canyon and watch me channel Rip Van Winkle. Still, even Rip Van Winkle would have stirred at the sound that woke me up. It was a yowl, something between a scream and a roar.
I shot out of bed. “...the fuck was that?” My use of profanity is generally free flowing in my day-to-day conversation, even more so when my fight-or-flight response kicks in.
“Coyotes,” my wife mumbled. “They probably got a deer.” She sleeps with earplugs, so she didn’t get the full Dolby Digital experience that I enjoyed.
I squeezed through the French doors that open to our patio. The rain was Old-Testament quality, and if that wasn’t disconcerting enough, suddenly, a light blinded me.
“Norm! Did you see that?” It was our neighbor who lives behind us, on the other side of our chicken coop. He sometimes keeps odd hours, and he was working in his garage. He wore one of those headlamps that miners use. “A bobcat just ran right past you,” he said.
“When?”
“Just a few seconds ago.”
So now I knew what the sound was. We’d seen bobcats in our canyon. We’d also seen coyotes, foxes, rattlesnakes, skunks, raccoons, and even mountain lions, but none had been so bold as to come over the fence and into our yard.
“It was in your chicken coop,” he said. “It bolted when I hit him with the high beam.”
Now my wife was awake. Her Snow White instincts for critters-in-trouble had kicked in. We shuffled out into the rain to investigate the coop.
Feathers everywhere.
It looked like someone had introduced the business end of a 12-gauge shotgun to a throw pillow. We since learned that chickens can eject their feathers when they’re attacked. It’s one part defense mechanism, two parts big ass mess.
My wife went into the coop. The crying had already started, and we hadn’t even confirmed a chicken homicide yet. We’d been leaving the chicken coop door open so the chickens could come and go as they pleased. We’re liberal with the chicken curfew, but we never considered that a bobcat might use a storm as cover for a coop invasion. So there we were, doing chicken inventory during a potential flood.
Catching chickens isn’t as difficult as they made it look in Rocky, but it ain’t exactly easy. And when it’s raining and dark and 2:30 in the morning, it’s even harder. After fifteen minutes, we confirmed that six chickens were safe, injury free, and back roosting in the coop. We also confirmed that some of the many millions of chicken feathers were soaked in blood.
“Chuckles is missing.” My wife’s voice was shaky and quivering.
“We lost her,” I said. “Sucks. Poor chicken. Must be terrible to get eaten alive.” I hate when people say stupid, obvious things, and there I was committing that same crime.
My wife ignored me and kept surveying the bloody feathers. She noticed that they led to the corner of the coop and then over the coop fence to the alley behind our house. She ran out the back gate and continued collecting feathers as if they were breadcrumbs leading her to a pot of gold in some Grimm’s Fairytale.
“It’s starting to rain harder,” I said.
My wife ignored me.
“We have to be at LAX in four hours,” I added.
She kept collecting feathers.
“Chickens only cost five dollars,” I pleaded. They’re a little more expensive now, but yeah, chicken life is cheap1 and perhaps not worth the prolonging of this trauma—at least that was the appeal I was going for.
I made all these points in an attempt to lull my wife back to bed. All I did was make her cry harder and dig her heels into this missing chicken fiasco. Thirty-seven minutes and who-knows-how-many-collected-bloody-feathers later, my wife tracked Chuckles down to a neighbor’s house about fifty yards away. The poor dear had wedged herself between a fence and a garden box, which is much better than being wedged between the jaws of a ravenous bobcat.
We brought Chuckles home and gave her a good once over. The bobcat had definitely done what bobcats are designed to do. A sizable gash had been split open on Chuckles’ saddle. If Chuckles were our child, we’d have been taking her to a 24-hour Newport Beach plastic surgeon, and if I hadn’t been one of the groomsmen in the wedding we were attending, my wife may have insisted on that. Instead she had to make due with a little backyard medicine.
Our daughter used to rock climb. She was pretty good at it, and in her training we became all too familiar with flappers. A flapper is what happens when a callous on your hand finally gives and the skin flaps off. It stings a little, but if you squirt a little super glue and flap the skin back on, you can keep climbing.
Similarly, medics used super glue in Vietnam to hold soldiers together before they got them into surgery. Step on a grenade and you pray your medic has enough super glue to hold your spleen in place before you can get lifted to the most depressing episode of M.A.S.H. ever conceived.
Well, if it was good enough for youth rock climbers and the U.S. military, it was good enough for Chuckles. We squirted a bunch of super glue into the gash, folded her back together, got some water down her throat, and set up the incubator so that she could convalesce. “Hey, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick…” My wife said gently to Chuckles. The pathetic hen purred and trilled, which is something chickens do when they’re content, and her soulless raptor eyes looked almost grateful. My wife’s tears had dried, though her eyes were puffy and her hair was still wet. Even so, she glowed, radiant in the aftermath of having done what she was called to do.
We made our flight, attended a gorgeous wedding, and returned home to find that Chuckles had laid a couple eggs in our absence, bobcat be damned.
The other chickens, though, didn’t lay for a few weeks. Trauma? Survivor's guilt? Who can say? My wife nursed them all back to baseline, and we kept our friends and neighbors in omelets and baking staples for a good long time.
Fast forward a couple years. We’d made it a habit of closing the chicken coop nightly. One night, though, after a few too many glasses of wine, we let it slip. Coincidentally it had rained that night, and a bobcat had been lying in wait. Was it the same bobcat? Can’t say for sure. But Chuckles was gone—nothing left but a few thousand feathers, a heaping helping of irony, and a newfound respect for destiny.
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*Note: the savvy among you may have caught that world-class dad joke I snuck in there.
I have chickens. Fox gets in sometimes. It's always a very tragic event. And a messy event. My daughter took one to the vet and spent 80.00 on her (her name was Elsa) all the while chicken was cooking in the crock pot for dinner that night.
Cheep cheep. Lovely, funny, and thoughtful, as per usual.