I Don’t Think So

The girl tells me Bouncer is actually resting and comfortable in this position.

Birds of Different Feathers

Yesterday  morning early Jay and Daren went goose hunting.  There is an early season here intended to knock down the resident Canada Goose population.  If you can find them on legally huntable land.   They are in lots of research fields, but…

Anyway, Jay came home with one goose and stories involving misses, misfires and double pumps to explain why he had only one and Daren had none.  But one goose is good, much better than no goose at all.

Jay has been listening to me and actually encouraged Hawthorne’s interest in the goose as he has hopes we might be able to train him to retrieve downed birds.  Jay kept a wing and the head and neck with a small cape for H. to play with.  The dog is in heaven when we bring them out.  Today he actually was carrying it around and flinging it.  Good dog. He might figure out what to do.

Then this morning I got a call from Sue’s husband; another chicken had just been hit in the road.  (Jay and I had prepared a lovely rooster for her after it insisted on being hit–I got feathers, she got the meat).  I drove up and retrieved a light-colored banty hen.  Hawthorne was very interested in the whole dry plucking, gutting procedure.  He also got trimmings and a foot to carry around for awhile.

We had some excitement when I decided it was too breezy to singe the fine hair feathers off the carcass outside and for some now inexplicable reason filled the bottom third of my white enamel sink with crumpled Wall Street Journal pages and lit them.

Newspapers burn high, hot and fast. It was a conflagration, though small and contained.  We opened windows and doors, and turned on the oven fan.  I think Isabelle will stay away from matches for awhile.  But the bird was singed really well.

So yesterday I had goose liver and heart for lunch and today chicken liver and heart.  Fried in butter, eaten with bread and butter pickle slices.  Yum.

And tonight: chicken cacciatore .

The Bass of His Dreams

Jay went fishing this morning.  He came home and in the house with some groceries,  a big smile, and the faint smell of fish.

Behold the behemoth: 20 inches and five pounds of large-mouth bass.

The shirt says “Buscad primero el reino de Dios y su justicia”.

Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

Jay said he has never before caught a 20-incher.

That bass was almost as big as Hawthorne’s head!

Jay did catch other fish, but would not allow them to be photographed.

Hawthorne looked at them.

Only Pounce is unimpressed.

“I am a cat, and therefore unimpressed”.

The Morning Walk

Isaac is off to Institute, pleased as Punch.  The girl as we drove away was asking exactly how did one acquire a driver’s license and how soon after turning the proper age.  Note that she has more than two years to that age.

This morning it was 44 degrees.  I wore a vest.  The cabbage fields were full of lovely shadows and colors in the early morning light.  Hawthorne loves the cooler weather and jumps and skips, twirls and snaps for joy.  The squash and pumpkins will have a hard time getting ripe if we stay in this mode for long, though.

Instead of walking up the runway as I usually do, I walked in the broad median of the cabbage field.  The first third are green cabbage, then a broad strip of red, then another of green.  Even with all their giant leaves, the largest cabbages are not yet very large.  Their leaves looked lovely and I thought momentarily of heisting one home.  Just to eat the leaves.  But no.  There is a reason there are perfect leaves and no weeds at all in the field, and it goes far beyond intense cultivation.  Cabbage production on a large scale requires a considerable array of pesticides and herbicides applied at specific intervals to make the round heads you see in the store.

Hawthorne was running in the soil margin, which I sadly note has had all the tilth knocked out of it (and probably has a hardpan now to boot) by the giant equipment the renters use, and he snuffed along the verge and ran up and down the runway, across it, into the alfalfa on the other side.

Near the end of the field I noticed, finally, a group of deer about 200+ yards away in the field and sun near the headland and stopped.  Hawthorne was busy with toilet duties and did not notice.

Perhaps because my boots made no noise in the soil as I came,  quite surely in the stillness of the morning air no scent betrayed us, and possibly because Hawthorne is fawn-sized, eventually three deer detached themselves from the small herd and walked towards us, cutting more than a third of the distance between us.  H. still was unaware of their presence.  I stood fixedly and observed them.  There were nine in all.  The largest four all had antlers and hung back.  The rest I think were a mix of does and fawns and the ones approaching were most likely fawns.  They were of good size.

When Hawthorne finally saw them the three deer were still coming towards us.  Hawthorne is not afraid of deer.  He goes out of his way to avoid cattle.  I think he thought these might be more cattle, like the ones two fields closer to home.  He stood quite still, sniffing, and finally came to me as I called sotto voce.

That bending over to hold Hawthorne broke the spell.  The deer turned and high-tailed it to their kin.  They all broke and jumped through the hedgerow into the woods.

Longer Than

Forgot to mention that a couple weeks ago we passed the mark in time where Hawthorne has been part of our family longer than he has been anywhere else.

He continues to change, though not as dramatically.  He loves his morning runs, chasing his toys, eating, being loved up.  He was especially intrigued by the residual skunk smell on the traps and in the back of the truck and jumps up in to explore that region each day since then.

He is such a good dog.  Except when he is not.  But I guess that is true for most of us humans, too.

Busy Days

Tuesday the girl helped set up for a fancy tea party.  Then Wednesday she helped waitress for the same.

Yesterday we went to the lake to celebrate early the birthday of one of my best friends.

Just before we went to the lake yesterday, I took a call from a man who had a family of skunks living under a shed situated under his deck very tight to his home.  So Jay and I rushed over and set three traps.

This morning he called–all the traps were full.  We both went and loaded the traps into the truck, then I went and took care of the wee beasties.

And they were wee. And cute.  But fully ‘armed’. It turned out we caught four young skunk kittens.  No mother.  The man has his own trap so he will catch her tonight, probably.

Of a Rooster and a Jumping Mouse

Sunday morning Jay and I let out a rooster who had been living alone in a raised pen for an unknown length of time.  A long time. He was beautiful and we felt sorry for him, and Sue did too.  And since she is not around right now to watch him get beat up by the other roosters we agreed it was a happy circumstance for all.

Well, maybe not so happy for the rooster.  He immediately started fighting the the largest rooster of similar coloring–think of a small Kellog’s Corn Flakes rooster. And then, after Jay broke up that go round, he started in with one of the white roosters.  He could have beat that one, if he had not been so tired from fighting all out with the first rooster.  Eventually he retreated to under the car.  Until Jay had to pull him apart from another rooster in the tall grass.

We think he had a very long day.

Yesterday evening he kept to the road edge, maybe even straying into the road, as cars were slowing down quite a bit in front of the house.  I was rather concerned, but Jay was not and we were busy carting hens from the portable cage into their evening pen.  Afterward I could not find the rooster and Jay conciliated me saying the bird would roost in the trees and keep to the short grass.

A new day.  And as I pull up to the Sue’s home at 7.30AM, there is a white van sitting in the driveway.  An anxious woman gets out and wants to know if “we are the ones with chickens”?  Guess who almost got run over by her?  And who, as we speak, is standing on the side of the road, or running into it as cars on the way to work go whizzing past?  You guessed!  That old rooster.

It was my turn at conciliation.  And then I chased that rooster down, cars and trucks coming to a standstill or slowing down, me feeling like a fool.  I finally directed him into the lawn and the expanse of grass and, perhaps, his unease at being in other rooster’s territory, slowed him down enough for me to grab him.

He is this moment residing with a lone hen in a small pen near the barn.  He will stay there for the time being.  Maybe he has to learn to be part of a group? To stay near the barn?  To avoid cars–for sure.  Maybe he and the hen can form their own unit.  She just lost her rooster when it attacked Sue just before her vacation and it came home with us to the soup pot.

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Also this morning, as I was getting in the car to go tend animals, Pounce ambled across the blueberry patch and placed something down, then looked at me so I got out and went over to look at the unfortunate object of his attention.

It was a juvenile kangaroo mouse.  I took it and put it in the egg pail.  Pounce was recompensed with a dab of peanut butter off my forefinger.  I took the mouse up to Sue’s and put it in a glass aquarium with shavings and dried grass which had held a white mouse we had kept at our home.  Until we fed it to the Corn Snake last Tuesday morning.

The kangaroo mouse was still alive when I left an hour later and seemed to be recovering use of its right foreleg.

I like kangaroo mice.