#countryproblems

After winter was over we only had one chicken left. The other two disappeared. Well, two days ago it was hot when I got home so I left the gate open after bringing the groceries in. Mostly I leave it closed so stray dogs don’t get in. 

Then yesterday my s.o. is laying in bed and I’m in the other room on the phone with my daughter and he says he sees a chicken outside the fence (in the desert). But I stayed on the phone another 30 minutes or so because I haven’t talked to my daughter in a month. I figure the chicken went out of the open gate yesterday and wasn’t going anywhere, since all the food and water was in the yard.

So when I hung up I switched shoes so I wouldn’t get cactus spines in my feet. I put on some furry moccasins. I didn’t realize all the dried foxtails were going to jump into my shoes.  And climbing up to the fence tweaked the bone spur in my heel, so I was not a happy camper. And I couldn’t find the chicken anywhere. I felt so bad that we’d lost our last chicken to the desert, but I didn’t want to get a heat stroke either so I went back home.

In order to lure it back to the fence I then went around to the side where the bedroom is and put out bird seed and water on the other side of the fence.

Then I had to go to the store. When I stepped out on the other side of the house, there was the hen standing under the shade tree.  Bugger. So I thought that was that and that I’d found the missing chicken.  

But then we started thinking that maybe the chicken  he saw was one of the two that disappeared in the winter.  

Anyway today I got up at 6:30 AM to do the watering before it gets hot out.  And I was sitting under that same shade tree filling a bucket with water when I spotted the chicken outside the fence. But I’d just seen the chicken inside the yard so I did a double take.  And it wasn’t a hen at all. It was a rooster. And I could hear the neighbor’s new rooster crowing in the year next door, so this is not that rooster, but I imagine it came from their yard. We haven’t had a rooster in years, since I sold all of ours.