by Doug Fine
I pocketed my first two dollars and wondered if I would have to declare myself a “Chicken Rancher” as well as “Goatherd,” “Writer,” and “Hopeless Internet Geek” on my next tax return. I envisioned profits in the tens of dollars. I was going to be some kind of organic Tyson tycoon. There was no end in sight.
It is crucial to the understanding of what happened next in my young ranching career to be aware that by late spring, Michelle and I were inseparable. Pretty on the inside and outside, the history and yoga teacher (Silver City really is crunchy) possessed all three of my dream woman qualities: a kind heart, a sense of humor, and plumbing skills. It had been love at first sight, and after a couple of months of hiking dates, suddenly half my dresser contained disproportionate numbers of halter tops and skirts. I finally had someone to call from lonely freeways in the middle of the night.
The problem was, the Funky Butte Ranch’s animals loved her, too. On the days when Michelle needed to drag herself to town at the crack of dawn for work, she had to close the pet door in the ranch house, or else Sadie would follow her the entire twenty-three miles to town. This meant the disappointed hound would be locked inside for the hour or two until I woke up for the morning feeding routine, thus preventing her from performing her contractual obligations as ranch guard dog.
That’s how the troubles began for my chickens. One morning in June, my day started with a nature documentary. One that made me forever alter my general pro-predator inclination and start rooting for the prey. Specifically, I was roused from vividly pleasant dreams by a piercing clucking scream. I’d describe it as a sound closest to the noise that will be made by the mother of the next woman to become engaged to Kevin Federline. Not the soundtrack with which you want to start your day.
I bolted, naked and groggy, out to the house’s main room and was greeted by the sight of a terrified chicken tearing past the sliding glass window. It was my best egg producer: a Rhode Island Red I called the Great Red Layer. Before I could rub my bleary eyes in disbelief, a red-haired coyote, with open jaws, followed perhaps a foot behind her, and maybe a foot away from me on the other side of the glass.
It was a beautiful and terrible thing to watch from the front row—and quite a rush of a way to wake up, let me tell you. A primeval chase was on, perpetrated by an animal that doesn’t have the option of shopping at a co-op. The Great Red Layer glanced over at me as if to call, “Security!”
As for the coyote, he was nothing like his cartoon icon—he was sleek, fast, healthy, and apparently without an anvil or Acme product of any kind. I watched in horror as the canine deftly scooped the Great Red Layer in its teeth without breaking stride just outside the by-now almost military-grade fencing surrounding what remained of my roses. As far as I could see, the predator wasn’t even wearing a pair of Super-Jet Roller Skates. There was no cliff nearby for him to fall off. No oncoming truck to slow his progress.
As Sadie and I dashed outside shouting “Hey! Drop it!” in our respective languages, the coyote in fact did the opposite, and was gone into the butte’s foothills before I realized I was barefoot and my toes were pincushions.
Sadie was on patrol the next day. I had rousted myself when Michelle took off and I did a little tap dance to distract the dog until my girlfriend was gone so that we could keep the pet door open and the ranch under surveillance. That day, no chickens were attacked, though the survivors were freaked out and had stopped laying.
We thought the coyote had moved on. To make absolutely sure, Sadie made sleep impossible by announcing as loudly and constantly as possible that the Funky Butte Chicken Breakfast Buffet was closed, effective immediately. She took to barking at suspicious movements in the air—the dog equivalent of shooting at anything that moved, and asking questions later. She was clearly blaming herself for the casualty.
Myself, I was surprisingly upset, too. I knew I had to brace myself for the cycle of life and death if I wanted to raise living things in a healthy ecosystem. And in the parlance of the rancher, “It was just a chicken.” But it was the Great Red Layer. It was a Funky Butte Ranch chicken. My next couple of days were tinged with sadness.
Michelle’s next work day was three days later, and given that we had spent very little of the previous night asleep (I recall we made tabouli and chocolate pudding at three a.m.), we reverted back to the closed pet door routine, so that I would not die of exhaustion. (Michelle, a compactly built energy bar of a woman with impossibly giant lake blue eyes, is one of those people who apparently doesn’t need sleep, ever.)
As a result, at seven a.m. I was treated to an exact rerun of the nature documentary. This time I lost my rooster and the two chicks that my jet black hen Agatha had just hatched. Agatha survived with rumpled tail feathers, but when I found her cowering under a juniper, she was suffering from an understandable case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It wasn’t a good day. Michelle came home that evening to an angry boyfriend sitting on the porch with a beer, a laptop, and a shotgun.
“Wanna watch Hee-Haw?” she asked, pushing the barrel of the gun in a safer direction.
“Dick’s back,” I said. “We’re down to six chickens.”
The coyote, who I had named Dick Cheney, had obviously cased the joint, observed the development of my relationship with Michelle, and studied our schedules and possibly even the intimate details of our courtship. He was living in an undisclosed location that was clearly within surveillance range of our bedroom. Using classic scientific observation technique, he had determined the exact two hours in the day (four days per week) when the chickens would be both out of their roosts and unguarded by Sadie. He was perfectly content to wait out the days when Michelle could sleep in. This, to my mind, is high-level thinking.
Once I realized what was going on, I began to see why a century of active, taxpayer-funded species-cide against these dogs has been less effective than a Fred Thompson campaign strategy. Coyote sightings are in fact increasing as people sprawl farther and farther into their territory. Though I was full of grief, disappointment, and disappearing protein, it was nonetheless hard for me to be unimpressed.
If the poultry assaults had stopped at this point, it would have been bad enough: daily ranch egg production had dropped from half a dozen to zero. My hens were emotional wrecks, and tended to stare at me resentfully at feeding time. I was starting to see the source of the barnyard phrases “brooding” and “chickenshit.”
But the carnage wasn’t over. Once it became clear to Dick Cheney that we were on to his scheme, he developed a new tactic: he waited until Sadie and I took our afternoon run. This damn wily canine was smarter than the combined mental efforts of two people and one Australian cattle dog. Sadie and I came back sweating and panting from an hour-long jog, a week or so after the last attack, and I couldn’t help noticing that another two chickens were missing.
I don’t know how he ate them so fast—all I came home to was a pile of feathers. They clearly don’t teach coyote pups the same table manners people are taught. Much more swallowing than chewing was going on here. At no point was there time for negotiation, let alone shotgun diplomacy.
In another couple of days I was down to two petrified hens—Agatha and a gray lady named Gray Lady who had been lucky enough to be nesting in the barn when the carnage began. The two survivors, in a remarkable evolutionary leap, had figured out how to cower at all hours inside the barn, awaiting the end of this terrible chapter in their lives. My only consolation was that my early goat corral work had been good enough to keep Dick Cheney’s dietary ambitions away from the Pan Sisters. Or maybe he was rightfully fearful of Melissa’s horns.
The truth is, I couldn’t blame the coyote. The only fair way to look at it, I thought, was to admit that if I shopped for fresh local chickens, why wouldn’t Dick Cheney? He had almost zero carbon miles in his low-fat, high-protein diet. He was an environmentalist.
There were no more attacks on the chickens. There were no more brave chickens—only the two terrified hens hunkered
down like Baghdad residents. So Dick Cheney switched strategies and went after my waste oil supply outside the barn. The container still carried a vague essence of Sisters’ Reuben sandwiches. It was irresistible.
Unlike his vice-presidential namesake, the coyote clearly wasn’t going away. To make sure the chickens, not the planet’s most intelligent species, didn’t provide more buffet, I had no choice but to secure the porous poultry coop with chicken wire so that the flock was only free range when I was around to personally supervise. A friend of Michelle’s had another rooster to donate, and I headed to JD’s Feed Store in Silver City for replacement chicks.
By this point, having survived a flood and repeated coyote assaults, the staff at the openly right-leaning JDs accepted me as a rancher, albeit that weird one who often tucked a wildflower into his cowboy hat. This fine June morning, I made my way to the feed-store counter, surrounded by people whose grandparents had fought Apache. I spent a half hour kicking back and discussing the advantages of one kind of sweet grain mix over another without, I hoped, being mistaken for Chevy Chase in Three Amigos. Then I got down to the point.
“I need a whole bunch of chickens,” I said to Wendy, a braided employee in tight Wranglers. “At least eight.”
“Eight out back!” Wendy called out, walking me to a cage the way an office-supply manager might show me where the printer toner was kept. “Got yourself a coyote do you?” She pronounced it Republican-style: KIE-yote.
“Smart bastard,” I said.
“Smarter than some folks I know,” she said. “We’ve sold a hundred chicks in the past week.”
The deviousness of Dick Cheney had wide reach in 2007.
After feeding time that night, Pat from the new Mimbres co-op called and asked why my egg deliveries had dropped off so precipitously after such an encouraging start. I tearfully explained to her that I was living in an Animal Planet special, and the predators were winning. “It’s been gory, and sad, and the only bright side is I can feel my cholesterol going down.”
When I hung up, I realized that my reliable protein, if it was going to be homegrown, would have to come from the goats’ milk when they gave birth next spring. At least until my young, second-generation flock started laying. As for the rest of my diet, agriculture would have to keep me away from Silver City’s attractively priced Chilean produce section.
FIFTEEN
WORSE THAN ELMER FUDD
I’d already tried my other option for local food-gathering: hunting. Back in the fall, I thought that one deer would provide my protein for a year. I thought wrong. They say your blood type determines whether you come from agricultural or hunter-gatherer stock, but my choice had less to do with my genetics than my inexperience with firearms. In fact, a small but vicious scar bore witness to my near-fatal attempts at becoming a self-sufficient carnivore. I should’ve known I’d prove lower on the totem pole than the inept outdoorsmen of my childhood: guys like Dorf and Elmer Fudd.
Having never fired a rifle before, I thought I was being clever by doing some prep work before deer season opened. After I had registered for the state hunting lottery, I started conspiring with local gun nuts, otherwise known as much of the male population of southern New Mexico.
My first outing that previous fall had been a gun training session with my friend Ant at the Grant County Shooting Range on a sunny afternoon in October. I’d messed around with a shotgun in Alaska, but I didn’t even know how to load the kind of rifle necessary for bringing down a mule deer. Ant, in agreeing to loan me his 30.07 (whatever that meant), insisted on a safety session amid the Rush Limbaugh listeners at the range. I was all for it. I even bought the orange cap.
“It kicks like a mule,” Ant warned, as we unpacked the weapon from its case.
Great. We can put probes on Mars but we can’t develop a firearm that doesn’t dislocate the shoulder? Ant shared this information after I ran to and from Wal-Mart to return (without being questioned) the incorrect-caliber bullets I had initially bought for the session. When it comes to guns and ammunition, New Mexico doesn’t have a five-minute waiting period, let alone a five-day one. Children here who have never heard of Lexington and Concord can recite every word of the Second Amendment. When East Coast Democrats begin to grasp this, they might start getting some votes in the West. It’s not about handguns and crime around here. It’s about meat and antlers. And beer.
At the range, Sadie hid under the driver’s seat while Ant and I popped off at paper cutouts of liberals, terrorists, and environmentalists. As I aimed, Ant adjusted my hands, shoulders, and feet until I was roughly in the shape of a bowline knot, and warned me about something called Scope Eye. This had to do with the bad things that happen to people who don’t brace the rifle butt fully while keeping their face far enough from the magnified eyepiece through which they’re aiming.
I learned that day primarily that firing a rifle is about a lot more than pulling a trigger. There were scopes to calibrate, official shooting positions to adjust, ear pieces to insert, backgrounds to check for safety, bullets to load into chambers, and prayers to utter. I counted fifty-four things to remember before each shot, more even than a diesel prestart ritual. With Ant there to stop me every time I nearly did something fatal, I wound up plugging a solid 30 percent of my targets that day. But it was all too much information to process, so I decided to have one more practice session back at the Funky Butte Ranch a week later, after the swelling in my shoulder went down.
I set up a small plant pot on the property line fence about a hundred fifty yards away, across the tangle of weeds I hoped would one day be my planting area. Then I tromped back up to my clothesline. I loaded the scary device. I aimed. I remembered about twenty-seven of Ant’s safety tips.
Fifty percent ain’t bad. But I was nervous. Something was nagging at me. Not a good feeling with a gun in your hands. Still, I overcame a strong Darwinian hesitancy, contorted myself into a formal firing position called, appropriately enough, Modified Jackass, and pulled the trigger.
When I came to, I felt conflicting emotions. On the one hand, from the pain throbbing in my temple, forehead, and nose, I recognized that I was definitely alive. So that was a relief. Continued life is generally my goal. On the other hand, thick scarlet globules of blood were dripping at one-second intervals from above my right eye, and in fact, the whole right side of my face and head was a circle of pain. The first sensation, that of relief, won out. In fact, it was buoyed when I saw that I had hit my target—the plant pot was half gone. I staggered inside, where I stemmed and treated the wound—a classic case of Scope Eye—with aloe.
“Give up hunting,” I said to the scary fellow staring horrified at me in the mirror. “Even NFL quarterbacks call it quits after four or five concussions.” Between goat wrestling and general ranch maintenance, I’d suffered at least half a dozen head injuries and tetanus-risking punctures since implementing my simple rural life. But this one was by far the most serious. I carry the scar to this day.
I didn’t give it up. The lesson painfully learned (Gun Thing to Remember #28: brace rifle against shoulder to blunt recoil), when deer season arrived, Sadie and I tramped around New Mexico for four pleasant days, not seeing anything larger than a rabbit. It wasn’t until I returned home and nearly drove on top of three legal bucks on the last stretch of road to the ranch—any of which would have been perfectly fine for me to shoot before new rules restricted my legal hunting area—that I learned from my friend Joey that (a) having a dog with me on my hunt ensured no deer in its right mind would be within a mile of me and (b) having a dog with me on my hunt was illegal.
Live and learn. On the bright side, I might have been the only hunter in New Mexico history to have his laptop, complete with wireless Internet, with him as he aimed for dinner, and so I sent a lot of colorful e-mails to friends about sunsets and the poetry of subsistence from my homemade deer blind. I had packed local bean burritos for the trip, so Sadie and I ate quite splendidly as well. As we dined, we listened t
o NPR.
Joey, hearing this pathetic tale, took pity on me, and twice took me out hunting birds with him during the winter. He told me he’d spent several years subsisting on quail, dove, and desert hare. It seemed like a good way to start, though I had some qualms about shooting the universal symbol for peace. But I needn’t have worried. The grand tally at the end of the two daylong trips was:
Joey: 11 quail, 16 doves, 5 hare
Me: 1 worm-ridden hare
I’m not sure if this was a simple matter of marksmanship, the fact that Joey had something like fifty-five years hunting experience under his belt, or my ambivalence about blasting innocent doves to kingdom come. Regardless, the lesson was that I wasn’t going to fill my larder via hunting. Not my first year. I was considering taking some bowhunting lessons, which seemed like a more sustainable method than gunpowder and lead anyway. But if my tribe had been the one to dominate at the dawn of our species, you could pretty much scratch the “hunter” part off hunter-gatherer. It was cultivate food, starve, or revert to preroasted rotisserie chicken.
SIXTEEN
CHICKEN LITTLE WAS RIGHT TO BE WORRIED
You can’t just throw seeds in the desert and expect to eat three months later. Even if something other than a cactus miraculously grows, you’ll suddenly be so popular with the local wildlife that your best bet is to switch back to hunting. The New Mexican squirrels alone are so fond of their veggies that Dudley, the slightly conspiratorial farmer who sold me my organic apple saplings, told me I’d do well to consider the kind of varmint traps that featured pry-apart metal jaws. I had inherited a few of these in the Funky Butte Ranch barn. I was scared to go near them.
