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Page 25
The days when I was put out of doors were indeed gala days to me. Many
families of young chickens lived in the back yard, and the pipings of
the little ones and the scoldings of the mothers when their children
ran too far away from them, were always amusing to listen to and gave
me something to think about which kept my mind off my own troubles.
I liked to watch the hens with their fuzzy broods tumbling about them,
or with the older chicks when they scratched the ground and ceaselessly
clucked for them to come to get their share of what was turned up in
the soil; meanwhile they kept a sharp lookout with their bright eyes to
see that no outsider shared in the feast. And how angrily did they
drive it away should a chick from another brood heedlessly rush in
among them to get a taste.
One old hen in particular interested me very much. I noticed her first
because of her pretty bluish color and the dark markings around her
neck, but I soon came to pity her, for she made herself quite unhappy
and seemed to take no comfort in anything. She was usually tied to a
tree by the leg, and although her string was long it seemed always just
a little too short to reach the thing she wanted. To make matters
worse she had a bad fashion of rushing wildly around the tree and
getting her string wound up shorter and shorter until at last she could
not stir a step, but would hang by one foot foolishly pulling as hard
as she could. It always seemed to me that her chickens were more
disobedient than the rest, because they knew she could not get to them
nor follow them.
Joe sometimes slyly threw pebbles at this blue hen to scare her and
make her jump and pull at the string, when he thought his mother was
not looking. As pay for his sport he often got his ears cuffed, for
though his mother did not seem to notice how cruelly he teased me, she
would not allow him to frighten her fowls.
"Don't you know that a hen that's all the time skeered won't lay?" was
the lesson she tried to impress on him as she punished him.
But the thing I liked best of all was to see Betty's seven white ducks
crowd up to the kitchen door every time any one appeared with a pan of
scraps. Such gabbling and quacking, such pushing and such stepping on
each other and on the chickens, in their eagerness to get there first,
was almost laughable. In fact, the pink-toed pigeons that walked up
and down the ridge of the barn roof, did make fun of them openly. Had
I not known the ducks were well fed and so fat they could scarcely
waddle, I might have thought they were really hungry, but I soon
discovered that they were simply greedy.
Standing on tiptoe and stretching up their long necks they often seized
the food before it had a chance to fall to the ground. By this good
management they usually got more than the chickens. Joe accused Betty
of being partial to the ducks.
"You allus give 'em the best of everything, and twice as much as you do
the chickens," he complained.
"They get the most because they've got the most confidence in me," said
Betty, putting on a very wise look. "They come close up to me, while a
chicken shies off and misses the goodies coz she's silly enough to be
afraid. Besides, the ducks are mine. I raised 'em. I paid twenty
cents a setting for the eggs out of my own money, and when you raise a
thing you generally like it the best. Ducks are a heap smarter'n
chickens, anyway," she asserted. "I never can get one of the chickens
to feed out of a spoon, and the ducks like it the best kind." To
convince him she held toward them a large baking spoon of soured milk.
This milk was thickened into a paste or ball by being put on the stove
and separated from the whey, or watery part, by the action of the heat.
It was a favorite dish with the fowls, and they all smacked their lips
when they saw it coming.
As fast as Betty could fill the spoon it was emptied by the ducks, who
stuck their big yellow bills into it and devoured the contents, letting
the chickens below scramble and push and pick each other for any stray
bits that fell to the ground.
"Didn't I tell you?" said Betty triumphantly. "Them chickens had just
as good a chance as the ducks, but they wouldn't take it."
"Huh!" answered Joe. "Their necks ain't long enough, is what's the
matter."
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