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THE TALE OF THE BROKEN ROOSTER

or

THE ROOSTER WHO WOULD NOT LAY EGGS

 

Mr. Singer is given to spending his long evenings in the barn telling about his life prior to coming to this little sanctuary on a certain road in Bastrop County. After all, he does have a great deal of time on his hands when his beloved Rose has gone off to an unknown tree in the dark, dark woods where the wild things dwell and he is tired from their long days hours spent freeing the barn and pasture of bugs and the grains the woman leaves for them to eat. Now and again he pauses in his story-telling to call out a long, mournful crow on the off chance that Rose will hear and brave the dark and dangerous woods to return to the safety of the barn. She does not return, of course, and so after a long and lonely night Mr. Singer awakes the dawn and then trudges off into the woods when the sun has safely breached the eastern horizon to find his beloved. Going from tree to tree he calls to her and finding her at last, returns to the barn to begin the day’s work with Rose ever at his side…until sunset.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mr. Singer

Mr. Singer and Rose

Just the other night he spoke of how it was he came to be at the animal shelter in Austin where the woman found him and brought him here to this quiet place. Well, quiet if you can ignore the pigs at mealtime. NEVER has he heard such a racket! Anyway, Mr. Singer, said, “I was born in a crowded room full of all these wet, kind of yellow things all around me. There were bits of white stuff, eggshells, I think, all around us and they poked into our feet once we managed to stand up. It was really crowded but we all managed to stand up and started looking around to see where we were.  The place was mostly dark and there didn’t seem to be any windows but it was warm  and everyone around me sounded like something I thought I recognized. In a little while something – I learned later that it was called a hand – started to reach in and pull us out a few a time and put us into some kind of contraption where we really couldn’t stand up so easily but there was stuff to eat and lots of us. I noticed that everyone looked pretty much alike; we were all yellow and by now we were getting fluffy. “Fluffy” was a word we kept hearing over and over when strange faces with voices would look in at us and remark about how “cute and fluffy” we were. So we came to think of ourselves as cute and fluffy but we still didn’t know what we were because we didn’t have any mothers around to teach us. In time we learned that we were at a place called a Feed Store and that the people who ran it as well as those who came in to look at us didn’t understand that we needed our mothers to teach us how to be what we were born to be.

One day a woman came into our Feed Store and scooped up a whole handful of us and then another. We were thrust into a dark thing that kept moving from one place to another to the point that we were getting kind of seasick. The woman took us home to her place and put us into a bigger box but this one at least had light and air coming through the sides so we could see where we were. She gave us good food and water and was really kind of nice to us for a long time. Eventually she gave us a MUCH bigger house and this one had funny little boxes filled with hay. My sisters – she said we were all girls – began to spend an unbelievable amount of time in those silly boxes and after some time would make all sorts of chicken noises and then stand up so that I could see these strange white or brown things in the hay where they had been sitting. The woman would come and gather those things up and would tell my sisters what good girls they were for giving her eggs. That’s how I learned what the odd things were. The woman would pick me up, look under wherever I had been sitting and just shake her head. I figured out that I was supposed to be making eggs just like my sisters did so I tried really hard to do what was expected of me but nothing happened.  Simply nothing.

One day a big, handsome bird moved in with us, took one look at me and started to peck me all over. I was really scared of him and tried to hide. I learned that he was a rooster and that he would somehow make baby chickens appear. I just didn’t know why he disliked me so much but I tried to stay out of his way and to hide behind my sisters. It didn’t work. The woman kept being disappointed with me because I wasn’t laying eggs like my sisters were so one day she just picked me up, stuffed me into a box and took me somewhere where all these horrible dogs kept barking at me until I thought I would simply die of fright. When she left me there, I heard her say to the people, “This chicken just refuses to lay eggs.” I really had no idea why the people at the noisy place full of dogs started to laugh until they cried.

Now there is actually a happy ending to this story of mine. I learned from those people – once they stopped laughing – that I am a rooster, a rooster just like the one who was so mean to me, and that of course I can’t lay eggs. I’m just not supposed to do that. I’m supposed to have hens of my own and take care of them and to take care of their little babies and to make sure that nothing hurts them but my absolutely most important job of all is to awaken the dawn.

Footnote: Mr. Singer came to Dreamtime in mid-January of 2010 and has found here a peaceful life with Rose, his partly wild Bantam Game Hen. Rose is a hen about half his size who stays happily by his side all day. However, when the day draws to a close, she goes off to the woods where she roosts in an unknown tree like the partly wild thing she is. Mr. Singer follows her to a point and then when he realizes that he is simply too large to slip through the fence as she does, he trudges dejectedly back to the barn where he passes the night waiting for the dawn so that he can be reunited with his beloved Rose.

Rose and Mr. Singer would be delighted to have a proper home built for them. At the present moment we do not have anything more than the frame for a possible chicken coop. If you have materials or expertise in building wonderful chicken coops, please consider giving these beautiful birds a safe house where they will not have to worry about any chicks they might produce eaten by the nightly raccoon visitors, chicken snakes or foxes.

I say that both would be delighted by such a home. The truth is that Mr. Singer would probably be much more delighted than would be Rose but I think that she too would be happy to raise chicks in a safe house. Rose would probably continue roost in the woods at night all through the long winter when she is not raising chicks.