by Brian Brett
But life on a farm is never that straight a line. The ruckus continued for a few days. And then finally, in one of those majestic awakening moments, I realized that Lucy was a he, and Maude too, and both ganders were fighting over Chloe. I was horrified that we’d introduced a third gander— Toulouse. Luckily, wise old farmers and magic dogs aren’t perfect either. Sexing a goose is not a sure thing. Toulouse turned out to be no gander, and suddenly everybody paired up. Domestic bliss settled upon the farm.
Lucy is the king, old and monstrous, and we soon decided his name was the short form for Lucifer. My neighbour remembers him from her childhood, and her memories weren’t always pleasant. He lived up to the name. I’ve had to hold him off with a board more than a couple of times. His legs are bent and arthritic from wrestling raccoons after midnight, one of his many aggressive hobbies. He is also fond of chasing the horse. His favourite trick is to surprise Jack when he is eating and latch onto a hind leg, then hold fast, wings out, gliding behind the fleeing horse. A great stunt, which fed Lucy’s ego, though it embarrassed the horse. After letting go, Lucy would waddle around the field honking proudly, informing all that he was Lucy the mighty horse tamer. This he practised with regularity until Jack ran through the grape arbour with Lucy attached. Lucy’s wingspan was about two feet wider than the narrow arbour. He hit the posts with a thunk you could hear a block away. Once the feathers finally settled, Lucy staggered off like a drunk, his horse-wrangling days ended.
STANDING IN THE HOT afternoon by the pond, remembering Lucy’s adventures with the horse returns me to a morning several years ago. I’m half asleep, still undressed, drinking my coffee. Sharon has gone to work, a twelve-hour shift at the emergency ward, and I’m looking forward to a sunny summer day on the land—the garlic needs pulling, and this good weather is perfect for drying the thousands of bulbs. Lucy and Chloe had hatched a flock of ten goslings. Lucy protected the eggs all spring, and his proud chest jutted out so far he was tripping over himself. Now he kept a careful eye out for eagles and walked a tight flock of goslings, with Chloe on rear guard. But today I noticed one of the goslings caught in the page-wire fence, its neck and wing through the wire square as it strangled itself. I put my cup down, slipped my gumboots on, and dashed out to the fence. It was only as I began extricating the thrashing little creature that I realized the gate was open and Lucy was approaching in full honk, aimed directly for a man’s most tender point.
The only thing I could do was turn aggressor, and since I already had one hand occupied, trying to release the nippy young goose, I grabbed Lucy by the throat and lifted him off the ground—an indignity he didn’t appreciate. He flapped his powerful wings at me, just out of range, squawking hoarsely as I tried to save his gosling. Then, hell, there was Chloe, and she went directly for the same delicate feature, and I found myself doing a bizarre calisthenic version of a samba dance, holding Lucy in the air, swooshing my ass to avoid the thrusts of Chloe, while still trying to release the gosling. Finally, I got it out of the wire and dumped Lucy on top of Chloe. It took a second for them to untangle themselves, and by then I was on my way to the house, where I slammed the deck gate shut.
Inside, I kicked off my gumboots and sat down with a graceless thud in my chair at the sunroom table. My coffee was still warm.
SEVER AL YEARS LATER, MAUDE, the small gander, died of old age, which upset the balance again. There was obvious discomfort in the flock, but we tried to live with it. This puzzled me because I always assumed a gander would gather as many geese as he could service, but not with this gang. Toulouse and Chloe were competing. Finally, we brought in a new gander, whom we named Murphy because he was kind of stunned—brainless and full of himself. Chloe and Toulouse had the same opinion, and the mighty Lucy, although now ancient, brutalized him. Murphy got the cold shoulder from everyone and was forced to follow twenty yards behind the flock. Sometimes he managed discreet trysts with Toulouse if Lucifer the Terrible wasn’t looking. Those geese gave me more lessons in power politics than I had ever dreamed possible. One day something happened by the pond. Murphy got fed up with the bullying and swagger of Lucy, and the big fight was on. This time, Murphy won. Filled with the ego of the young stud in all his glory, he drove the ancient Lucy away.
The old giant sat lonely on the fringe, plaintively honking for his love of many years (geese are supposed to mate for life), Chloe, but the old tart defied tradition and switched her allegiance to the new hero. Once again I learned how time and history take us, though it broke my heart to watch Lucifer—so crushed by his defeat he even let the chickens drive him from the feed trough.
A week after he lost the battle with Murphy he had a stroke and could no longer walk much. He went blind, and since he couldn’t see Murphy, the young gander tormented him at will. This is the way it works in the natural world, but it also works other ways. I grabbed Murphy and cut off his head. Then I plucked and gutted him and we smoke-cooked him with a cranberry sauce on the side, proving once again to myself that not all the decisions we make while living with the natural world are smart or environmental— such as bringing a young gander into an old flock. But he was delicious.
A LITTLE OVER A year later Toulouse died, probably from egg binding, a condition where a bird can’t lay an egg and goes toxic. This left only Chloe and Lucy. Lucy would swim blindly in circles for hours, honking, yet I didn’t have the strength to put him down. According to local estimates he was a fabulous thirty-seven years old. Every night I brought grain to the pond and poured it into the shallows so the sheep couldn’t eat it. Chloe, in an old-age display of tenderness, would honk, and he’d follow her voice to the grain and then step all over it, blindly feeding, while she stared in disgust at the mess he was making of their dinner. But every night she would call him in until he died, and we buried him under the willow tree.
If I consider the intelligence and politics of geese I can’t help but admire them—and regard with horror the gruesome practice of foie gras. When it comes toward me on a biscuit these days, I turn it away. I prefer our own version, with the livers of animals naturally raised that we’ve slaughtered. It’s not the same quality, yet it has some virtue—the animal wasn’t tortured. Because geese and ducks have no gag reflex, they are perfect vehicles for being tightly caged— in the old days with their feet nailed to the floor—and force-fed through tubes. Foie gras is merely the term for a diseased “fat liver.”
Chloe stood guard for years after we arrived at the farm. Her call in the night would rouse me, and I’d listen in the moonlight until I was sure she was not alerting us to a predator or a dog pack. She had the best ears on the farm, and when I cracked the feed bin in the late afternoon she’d bellow her dinner honk, which roused the sheep and brought them up from the lower fields to the troughs by the gate—until the day, only two years after I began telling this eighteen-year-long day, Sharon went out to feed the sheep and saw Chloe floating asleep in the pond with her neck tucked under her wing. It took Sharon a few minutes to realize that Chloe was dead. She returned to the house teary-eyed, and told me she thought Chloe had tucked up for the night, ancient and regal—then died in her sleep. That bird always had class.
WE NEVER RAISED MANY ducks, especially after a flock of Muscovys escaped from our neighbours, packing their young up to our ponds, and became a great feast for the eagles, which picked them off, one at a time. Even the ravens got into the act. They would fly at the young in waves, one bird returning over and over again as the ducklings got used to the cycle of diving and surfacing, diving and surfacing, until the second raven came in as the duckling surfaced . . . .
Duck eggs are a delight. I separate the white and mix it with minced, spiced pork and green onions and then put it in a dish surrounding the yolk and steam it. It’s a Chinese tradition I picked up somewhere. It also works with the even stronger-flavoured goose egg. These days a friend keeps Indian Runners and provides me with the occasional duck egg I need. This will change soon. The avian flu hysteria has suppresse
d public sales of ducks in North America, and only a few varieties are raised for food in distant factories. Duck eggs are difficult to find in stores, and a multitude of varieties are endangered.
AS THE GOOSE AND duck declined in our diet over the past century, the ascendancy of the chicken and the turkey began.
The wild turkey is a canny bird, as any turkey hunter will attest. The best place to surprise the clever, skittish turkey is from a hunting chair in a tree, which the birds don’t notice because the adult turkey has no real airborne predator. Amateur hunters are notoriously inept at attaching their tree chairs and have a tendency to get drunk or nod off—so they tumble out of the trees at an impressive rate. Thirty-six percent of hunter injuries in Georgia in 1990 were caused by plummeting from trees.
The wild turkey—our table variety is a pathetic descendant— is an intelligent, beautiful creature that can fly fifty-five miles per hour and run at eighteen to twenty-five miles per hour. It has a lifespan of about fifteen years. The wild turkey is so smart that Benjamin Franklin volunteered it would make a better national symbol for the usa than the bald eagle, a carrion eater that is pretty but cowardly— qualities that some unsympathetic American political commentators consider apt. In America, it’s traditional for the president to pardon a turkey every year. That turkey gets to live out its days on a “sanctuary” farm. President George W. Bush pardoned more than twice as many turkeys as prisoners on death row. The first turkey pardoned was a pet of Abraham Lincoln’s son Tad, who became hysterical at the thought of eating it for Thanksgiving, and thus the tradition began.
Not much is known about the early days of the domesticated turkeys because the colonialists destroyed almost all the Native American records they encountered. Surviving fossil evidence shows the birds are at least 10 million years old and that they were raised confined by Natives in Mexico two millenniums ago. Both Columbus and Cortés took such a liking to these birds and advocated their use so enthusiastically that by 1530 domestic flocks were appearing around Spain. The Pilgrims were well acquainted with them before that legendary first Thanksgiving dinner of Native American crops and game.
At Trauma Farm we’ve raised standard bronze turkeys, a variety that resembles the wild turkey and remains capable of surviving without human intervention. Many of our friends raise other varieties. Bev and Mike Byron tend to grow the white broad-breasted—the commercial bird. However, Mike runs them free-range and feeds them grain, so they are delicious even if he loses birds because they aren’t bred to thrive in the natural world anymore. Like all free-range birds, these cook faster than the fatty, confined birds fed high-protein pellets because they’re active, making their meat denser and more heat conductive. Other friends are part of a desperate continent-wide community attempting to save the last, endangered remnants of the great breeds.
The inbred domestic turkey, debeaked and declawed, is raised in darkened, ammonia-stinking sheds housing up to fifty thousand birds. More than 300 million turkeys a year are produced this way. The white broad-breasted is preferred by the factories. Fed their own recycled excrement, rendered animal offal, and reject grain formulated into chemically fortified pellets, factory birds are often diseased by the time they reach your Thanksgiving or Christmas table. If the turkeys are not confined to individual cages, which they almost never are, and if a door is opened to an outside pen, which shed-raised birds would seldom dare to explore, they can legally be called “free-range” and sold at an increased price. Ninety percent of all factory birds are tainted with bacteria, including the nasty campylobacter. The last U.S. Department of Agriculture estimate I could find stated that 35 percent of the birds have salmonella. The number is greater today, which explains the pressure to irradiate meat with gamma rays. Salmonella and E. coli and other bacteria die when they’re nuked, so irradiation will allow the slaughterhouses to become even dirtier and spray more meat with excrement during slaughter.
That’s why I want to know my turkey before I eat him. I check out the farm, its range, the feed. When that’s no longer possible, I’ll probably join the growing millions who prefer their birds in a tree, not in the oven, and sit down to the dreaded tofu turkey. According to the National Turkey Federation, 97 percent of Americans ate turkey on Thanksgiving in 2007, consuming 45 million birds on a single day. This is another of those statistics I suspect; nevertheless, these numbers make me wonder who actually has the strongest flocking mentality.
PEOPLE ASSUME CHICKEN HAS been central to our diet since time immemorial—that the bucolic fantasy of the small farm and a flock of chickens in the yard goes back to Babylon. This is not true. Though the chicken was domesticated early as a fighting bird rather than for meat or egg production, wild birds fed the lower classes around the world more than chickens did. Aside from domesticated geese, ducks, turkeys, and the occasional chicken, local diets of fowl included pheasants, pigeons, quail, peafowl, and whatever other bird could be trapped or killed. Peafowl were generally reserved for the aristocracy, but poaching is an ancient tradition. They have a reputation as a tough-fleshed bird if not hung properly. Yet it can be delicious—one of my best meals ever was a broiled, curried peahen.
The poet P.K. Page visits our farm occasionally and, like most guests, is enamoured of our peafowl. She once told a story of a king who grew so angry with a peacock he had it sewn up in a leather bag and left to die. She couldn’t comprehend that kind of cruelty, but she’s never been at the farm during breeding season—from April to July. The scream of a peacock can be bloodcurdling at close range (as scary as a cougar’s wail). It sounds like a woman’s high-pitched scream for help. At a distance, oddly, the pitch changes so that the cry becomes haunting and romantic. However, hearing the mighty Ajax scream at two in the morning while perched on a balcony rail outside our bedroom window is enough to lift us right off the mattress. Repeat that sound every hour and every night for a couple of months, and sewing him up in a leather bag starts to sound like a good idea if you’re an uncontrollable king.
Peafowl, originally from Indochina, have been domesticated for millenniums. Brought to Europe via Egypt, they became the favourite bird of kings and monasteries. I sell the cock’s moulted feathers to pay the flock’s annual grain bill. As a child I was enthralled with the peacocks at Stanley Park in Vancouver, and their cries haunted my dreams. I promised myself if I ever owned acreage I would have peafowl. (Because of the noise factor, they need a minimum ten acres—otherwise the neighbours will be holding public meetings about you.) So I told Sharon they were one of my musts when we moved to the farm. She’s never quite forgiven me.
We ended up with four peafowl running free on the farm. They became our friends, even as they demanded hand-fed grapes or raisins and raised havoc in the garden, dust bathing in freshly seeded beds or devouring the broccoli and cauliflower. We survive the screaming, though it leads to near-divorce every May. The male is merely standing guard, acting as both a lure and a warning system for predators, real or imaginary. Fifty feet off the ground on a narrow branch, and ready to fight, he’s a formidable foe, unlike the peahens, who are vulnerable on the nest. Being good mothers, they’re reluctant to leave their eggs, even under attack. Our survivors have grown wise and usually nest close to the house where the dogs can protect them.
Peafowl are inquisitive birds, and they often peer in our bedroom window in the morning, as if wondering why we aren’t up yet. It’s been dawn for twenty minutes! In the summer months they consider any open door an invitation. When our backs are turned they scoot in and rush along the low windowsills, snapping up the dead flies. This makes for impressive housecleaning, but the reward is usually a big plop of skanky peafowl shit on the spruce floor in the front room.
Sharon’s father, Andy, visited the farm during the last years of his life. Almost blind, in his eighties, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he’d drift in and out of delirium because of the combination of strong medicines he’d been prescribed. After a while we got used to his rambling and didn’t
pay attention if he announced there was a ferry boat parked in the pasture or those cia agents were in the closet again.
Preparing dinner late one afternoon, Sharon and I were in the kitchen, with her father nattering away in the front room. We couldn’t see him behind the adobe divider, but his occasional bizarre announcements made us laugh, softly, despite ourselves. He was a dear, sweet man. After a while he began talking about how all the birds loved him. He declared himself the king of birds. I decided to peek around the corner. He was in his armchair blindly basking in the warmth coming from the sunroom. On each side of his chair sat the peafowl like regal attendants, Ajax to his left, his long tail fanned out behind him on the spruce floor, and Juno on Andy’s right. Both birds held their heads erect, staring proudly at me.
ON THE OTHER HAND, meat chickens are grotesque creatures these days, and a very different fowl than their ancestors. The only good thing to say about the avian flu hysteria is that much of the commercial stock was destroyed during the panic, at least in Canada, and so breeders had to go back a few generations to start rebuilding their flocks with real chickens.
The average North American has not tasted a real chicken for years. Earlier, I wrote about the egg layers, their feed, and the growing conditions. The world of meat chickens is equally harsh. Just as the choice of laying breeds is narrowing, the remaining hatcheries offer an increasingly more limited range of meat birds. The current commercial meat birds are almost entirely descended from the feisty Cornish cross. Their offspring, the Cornish giant, has a tendency to grow as fast as a cancer, and its heart can just explode as the bird waddles over to the feed trough. But the Cornish giant is merely the grandfather of the new standard hybrids—the sickly Hubbard and the misshapen Arbor Acres, which, like the turkey, was bred to have bigger breasts and smaller thighs because that’s what the market demands. I couldn’t raise Arbor Acres and sleep at night. They require a controlled environment and enhanced feed to survive. They’d die if kept in the open air and fed traditional grains.
