Yip, this really happened.

Pook the chook and the pyramid of Pearl

A Tale of Tai (30-day April Challenge #22)

Summer in Hanmer Springs, a popular South Island resort town, gets pretty damn hot. Hanmer (we locals don’t need to remind ourselves there are springs) is situated in a small valley between some pretty spectacular mountain country and, being well sheltered, it accumulates the heat in the summer and the snow in the winter.

This particular tale had its beginnings in the Spring and reached its crescendo at the height of Summer. Yay, bloody yay, let me tell ya.

A Trio of Tail Feathers

Not that there were only three feathers but that there were three with tail feathers, yeh get me? Like many residents of anywhere I choose to throw my swag at any given time, these three just kinda happened.

Pook was a Chinese Silky bantam cross of some description. She was small and squat and always busy. She was cute, too. All golden feathers with a little bonnet on her head and feathery feet. The trekkers (because we were running a multi-purpose equestrian center at the time) absolutely adored her. Hell, I was pretty fond of her, too. Anyways, she, I think from memory, came as a kind of bonus edition with a horse we bought. Why? Hell’d if I remember but that’s the kind of thing that happens to us, like, all the time.

Pearl, we found on the side of the road somewhere after she’d fallen off a truck on its way to the chicken nugget factory. She was a plain white ex-battery hen with scant all feathers and a cropped beak and fucked up feet when she came home with us. She made a rather remarkable recovery, which becomes relevant to this tale shortly.

As for Roo, he was one of those spectacular roosters with the black and green tail feathers and an attitude to match (until the hawk incident, but that’s a tale for another time) and buggered if I know quite where he came from. He might even have simply shown up one day. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

His part in this tale is pretty much non-existent aside from the fact that he was, well, there.

The case of the disappearing Pook

Our trio of tail feathers spent their first year with us just being chooks. They scavenged around the horses’ feed bins and hassled the trekkers and sunbathed on the backs of the horses when they had their rugs on or on the fence rails when they didn’t. Periodically, Pearl would lay an egg in weird places, like in feed bins or on saddle blankets and, sometimes, we even found them early enough to be useful.

The second year, Pook went missing.

She left us in the spring and we had no idea where she went. At first, we thought our resident falcons from the ridge opposite the barn might have gotten her. They often flew down low over the yards to see what they could see and sending the chooks scurrying for cover, but we never found any evidence and then, every once in a while, Pook would randomly return, only to disappear again.

At the same time, Pearl stopped leaving us random eggs in random places which we put down to the eggs had finally run dry.

Spring rolled into summer and the grass dried off and it was time to hit the haybarn for supplementary feed.

The Discovery

The barn that year held one thousand bales of hay. One thousand! That’s a lot of hay, folks, and it takes a bit of getting through, even with sixty horses in the string. At the back of the barn, tucked away in a corner (and lord knows why it was ever left there in the first place), was an open forty-four-gallon drum in which had, at some time, been stored a pile of used feed bags. The feed bags filled the drum to maybe halfway.

This became a very significant drum. A bomb of a drum, even.

One (very, very hot) summer’s day, one of our young summer staff came to the office to tell us, with much excitement, that they had solved the mystery of the missing Pook. Pook the chook had been found! Where was Pook? Why, Pook was sitting in the self-same forty-four-gallon drum at the back of the haybarn, on top of the pile of feed sacks.

Marvelous, that’s wonderful. Is she still there? No, no longer. And a minor disaster had occurred which would change the barn dynamics for a very long while to come.

You see, Pook was not only sitting upon the feed sacks. Nope, that was only the half of it. Recall if you will the case of the dearth of eggs from Pearl, which we had erroneously put down to her no longer having any eggs to give. Pearl had plenty and Pearl had been laying them ALL. . . in the forty-four-gallon drum. In which Pook had been sitting. On top of a growing pyramid of eggs. Many eggs. An entire spring and half a summer of eggs.

Poor Pook. She had done her best to incubate them, straddling them with her little squat body and her little short wings. But the pile kept growing and she kept sitting and, you guessed it; the pile of eggs above was crushing the pile of eggs below and Pook couldn’t keep any of them properly covered.

And then, along came our well-meaning yard hand and Pook scrambled and the whole dang pile. . . exploded!

Crime Scene

You couldn’t get within forty feet of that damn barn without a gas mask! Half a drum’s worth of eggs, rotten eggs had exploded in a steel drum in a steel barn full of hay, in mid-summer! 40 degrees Celsius on a good day. We drew straws to determine who got to do the hay collection and, instead of the hay barrow, we used the truck so we could at least have the windows up and the aircon on for between throwing bales onto the back. We got damn good at throwing bales at super speed. Nobody wanted to linger around that barn for any longer than they had to.

On a breezy day, the smell would waft around to the yards and the office, and the horses would snort and we’d be wearing eucalyptus oil on our wrists and our hat brims. Even the following summer, by which time we’d purged the drum to the dump and cleaned out the barn, you could still smell it on a particularly hot day.

We built the chooks a house after that and locked them up at night with special treats to ensure compliance. One egg crime scene was more than enough for any of us to be contending with. Ever!

To ALL of you fabulous writers out there,

Kia kaha and aroha nui. 💞

Fighting! 👊

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