Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga

by Todd Alexander

  ‘Roy?’ I called out to him. ‘Roy!’ I said a little more forcefully.

  But Leroy was ignoring me. The goanna was edging closer and closer and I feared the worst but also wanted Leroy to learn a lesson if the goanna got too close. By now it was about two metres from Leroy, then one . . . and when it took one step further Leroy puffed himself up, arched his back and let out a terrifying growl. The goanna hightailed it out of there faster than I’ve ever seen one move and Leroy came back to me full of pride, purring around my legs as if to ask for praise for protecting me. He repeated the same feat a few years later when a goanna came hunting after another of our birds. Jeff managed to scare the lizard off in the nick of time and as he turned around to reassure the petrified birds, there was Leroy all puffed up and hissing – Jeff’s backup guy for the all-in brawl.

  Lizzie loved being the only free-range chook on the property. Each morning we would let her out of her little hut and off she’d go exploring, looking for worms and bugs. She was particularly drawn to the sound of human voices so if Jeff had the radio on while he worked she would limp over to keep him company. One day one of our guests left his villa door open while he took a shower and when he came out of his bathroom Lizzie had made herself comfortable on the couch, thank you very much indeed. She was everybody’s favourite animal for some time, limping her way from place to place, but when we finished the fourth villa she had to be moved. A few weeks later I found her hiding and didn’t think much of it, but sadly, the next day she was dead.

  Lizzie’s death reminded me of the time my desk phone at work rang back in early 2013.

  ‘—’s sick,’ Jeff said softly.

  I didn’t catch the name but immediately thought of Leroy. We’d often worried about his tree change and the wide array of wild animals he would be encountering (foxes, snakes, huge goannas, wild dogs, feral cats, to name but a few). All Leroy’s urban antics flashed before my eyes when Jeff told me someone was sick because I knew Leroy thought he was tougher than he actually was. Block Eight was no Annandale alley.

  ‘What? What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m at the vet and they can’t fix it,’ he said, again speaking softly.

  ‘Jeff, tell me what’s happened!’

  ‘She can’t breathe.’

  ‘She? Who?’

  ‘Barry!’

  Barry was one of the first chooks we ever purchased, a black bird so named by the kids, for whatever reason. Now that I knew it wasn’t Leroy, I calmed down to better understand the situation.

  ‘I went out to feed them this morning and she was rasping heavily, like something was caught in her throat.’

  ‘Has she been smoking?’

  ‘What? Toddy, this is serious!’

  ‘Sorry. What did the vet say?’

  ‘They said they aren’t equipped to handle her and that I would need to take her to Sugarloaf because they’re good with birds there.’

  ‘What’s Sugarloaf?’

  ‘An animal hospital about an hour away.’

  ‘Okay. So what do you want to do?’

  ‘She sounds awful Toddy, really awful.’

  ‘Why don’t you take her to the hospital and get their opinion on her and then we’ll make a decision from there.’

  Sugarloaf admitted her as an emergency.

  ‘What’s her name?’ the receptionist asked Jeff.

  ‘Barry.’

  ‘Is it a rooster?’

  ‘No, she’s a hen.’

  Dr Alex is an avian specialist. He examined Barry and gave Jeff his diagnosis. She would need to remain in care overnight and be placed in an oxygen tank, just like Michael Jackson but without a chimp for a companion. She might also need an exploratory scope inserted down her throat.

  ‘How much is all that going to cost?’ I asked Jeff when he relayed the information.

  ‘Probably around six hundred dollars,’ he said.

  ‘Okay,’ I sighed. ‘I think we need to realise that a chicken is a chicken and she provides us eggs. No chicken in the world is worth that much, we just can’t afford that.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Is she in any pain?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘So I think you should take her home and see how she goes.’

  Almost every day we expected to find Barry gone but she lived on . . . and on . . . and on. Barry was also immortalised on one of those early wine labels, on our first Shiraz. Barry outlived all but one of her five sisters from our original chook purchase – Brooke (named by Lucy), who’d been the top of the pecking order.

  I once asked Lucy where she’d got the name Brooke and she looked at me like I was stupid. ‘You know: brook brook,’ she clucked.

  So a few months after Lizzie’s death when I saw Brooke lying very still I kept a close eye on her and, noting she hadn’t moved the following day, took action. Jeff took her inside and put her on a comfortable bed. He tried to handfeed her and give her water but she pecked at it with very little energy. We thought she might have been suffering from heat stroke or perhaps had been accidently hurt by one of the goats so hoped she would show signs of recovery after a few days’ respite. On the third morning, however, she still looked as though she was paralysed and when I went to tend to her, she was sitting in a stinking pool of her own faeces. Her eyes were more or less lifeless.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Jeff asked. He is the true birdman on the property; my affections are more with the mammals.

  ‘I don’t think she’s going to recover, I think she’s paralysed and we need to put her out of her misery.’

  ‘Put her down at the vet, you mean?’

  ‘No. I mean, man up and put her out of her misery.’

  ‘Toddy, what are you saying?’

  ‘I think we need to kill her quickly and humanely, and take care of it ourselves like normal farmers do.’

  To be honest, I’m not sure where the bravado had suddenly come from. It just didn’t feel right to run off to the vet asking for a lethal injection every time one of our chickens showed a sign of irreparable illness. I had seen Paul West chop off a chook’s head on River Cottage Australia and the imagery had been utterly disturbing (admittedly even for him) now here I was suggesting that we (Jeff) should do the same. Part of the justification was financial – we certainly didn’t have a few hundred dollars for a needle every time a chook was close to death, and part of it was taking ownership of the lives we’d brought onto the property and their accompanying deaths, when it was within our control and the most humane thing to do.

  ‘How would you do it?’ Jeff asked.

  ‘I think you should chop her head off with an axe,’ I suggested. ‘She won’t even know what’s hit her and then you’ll have relieved her suffering.’

  ‘Oh Toddy, I couldn’t . . . I can’t . . . Can’t you do it?’

  ‘No way!’ I said determinedly. ‘Not a chance in hell.’ But then I looked at poor Brooke, who’d once been the very top of the pecking order, a big fat healthy hen full of her own sense of importance, and that was a far cry from the pathetic lifeless bird that I saw lying at my feet. ‘Go get the axe,’ I commanded. ‘But I can’t remove the body, you’ll have to take care of that.’

  Feel free to skip over the next paragraph because I can tell you – without question – that it is the hardest thing I have ever had to do.

  We got a thick wooden board to lay Brooke down upon, and made sure the axe was sharp and rust-free. We carried Brooke outside, stroking her gently on the back. Jeff gave her a spoonful of strawberry yoghurt and she licked at it without much gusto, but even that small amount was a symbolic last meal of a richness she had never had before. We lay her down on the board ensuring she was as comfortable as possible, coaxing her neck out straight. I had told Jeff that I would do it with my eyes closed but I now saw that would be foolish and unfair to Brooke – if I missed the results could have been catastrophic. I raised the axe over my shoulder and brought it down with all of the strengt
h I could muster, careful to aim it precisely on her neck. The blade went through with ease and the blood ran quickly from the top of her shoulders and out of her mouth came some of the strawberry yoghurt. I was at once disgusted with myself, and proud in a bizarre kind of way, that I could force aside my own squeamishness to bring a swift and hopefully painless end to Brooke’s suffering. I can categorically say that I will never, ever kill a bird ever again.

  Brooke’s death haunted me for many days. In my dreams I saw her head separated from her body, the blood, the yoghurt, and just how ridiculously easy it was to take her life. Jeff had disposed of her body (it was always our philosophy to place dead chickens in the bush far away from their pens so that they could be eaten by hungry animals) but the blood pool had remained behind.

  I had spent most of my twenties as a pescetarian and my philosophy was simple. If I wasn’t prepared to kill an animal for myself then I wouldn’t eat it – so, as I found catching and preparing fish easy, it felt acceptable to me to continue eating them. But killing Brooke had blurred the line . . . I had killed her to end her suffering, I knew now I could never, ever kill a bird to eat it, so why was I eating supermarket-packaged chicken several nights a week? Killing Brooke brought with it, in many ways, that dilemma of whether it was acceptable having industry do your dirty work for you so you could push it far back into the recesses of your mind. I could no longer eat pork on the bone; would never consider eating goat but now I had to decide: was it still okay to eat other meats?

  Over the years you get to know chickens and their illnesses better. There are products you can buy to place in their water on particularly hot days and this medication helps them stay cool during heatwaves. Five years after Barry’s trip to the vet, another of our chickens, Nicks, came down with a mystery illness similar to the one I’d seen in Lizzie and Brooke, only she could at least still walk.

  It was 31 December 2017 and we were due at the neighbours’ house to celebrate New Year’s Eve. But it was getting later and later in the afternoon and Nicks wasn’t getting any better and the water we’d been force-feeding her didn’t seem to be making a difference.

  ‘Do you think she might be eggbound?’ I asked Jeff. We looked it up on the internet and sure enough, Nicks was displaying nearly all the symptoms.

  ‘Sorry we’re late,’ I said to Natalie and Andrew about an hour later. ‘We’ve been massaging our chicken’s abdomen in a warm water bath.’

  ‘You’ve what?’ Natalie asked with a laugh.

  I explained further. As we were still without running water inside the villa we were now building for ourselves, Jeff had sponged himself down while standing in a large crate of warm water from the kettle so we’d placed Nicks in it to help ease her straining. ‘Apparently it’s what you need to do if you think they’re eggbound.’

  ‘You guys . . . honestly . . .’ she said and introduced me to one of her friends.

  As odd as it may sound, it worked. When we came home later that night Nicks had laid an egg on the bathroom floor where she’d been placed on a plush cushion for comfort. I picked her up and placed her on my chest and stroked her for half an hour or so before we went to bed, the chicken gradually falling asleep in my arms. The next day she was completely back to normal and while we’d lost many other chickens to heat stroke (and fox attack), I wondered, had I been smart enough to think of them being eggbound as the cause, whether I might have been able to save Lizzie and Brooke from their horrible deaths.

  Nicks and her sister Stevie are the most tactile birds we’ve ever owned. I named them for Stevie Nicks because the night we saw her in concert at a local vineyard with Chris and Verity was also the night a fox had taken five of our six chickens. Stevie and Nicks love to be picked up and stroked and rarely struggle to be set back down. At dusk all Jeff has to do is call ‘Chook, chook!’ and they will come running to him, ready to be carried back to their roost and locked away for the night in the Taj Mahal of chook pens that Jeff built, safe from foxes and other nasties. If they hear voices, they gravitate towards humans, always wanting in on the action, just as Lizzie had.

  Naturally, when any of the chickens died it was Jeff’s job to come and retrieve the body. He was so proficient at handling carcasses it just didn’t make sense to train me in the same skill.

  *

  The chooks weren’t the only fowls on the property.

  We’d taken Mel, Jesus, and their young daughters, Sophia and Amelie, to the Hunter Valley Zoo in the spring of 2016. Watching the girls interact with the animals was a genuine pleasure. I also looked at the various creatures speculatively. Over the years we’d featured different animals on each of our wine labels but after perch, yabbies, ducks, chickens, pigs and kangaroos we were running out of logical options.

  Mel pointed to a peacock trailing its magnificent tail: ‘That’s what you need next, one of those. Aren’t they lovely?’

  I laughed but didn’t seriously consider it and for the rest of the zoo visit we played ‘spot the possible wine-label animal’ but nothing was an actual contender.

  Strangely enough, two weeks later I walked into the local pet shop to buy some supplies and the owner, Trevor, showed me a peacock in a small cage and a peahen housed in with the chooks. I’d never really entertained the notion of owning exotic birds but I knew we could give them a good home and . . . hmm, maybe a peacock strolling around the grounds would be just a little bit fabulous.

  Spencer and Katharine (Kate for short), as I named them, were soon ours. The next few hours were spent researching online how to keep peafowl. They moved in with the chickens at first because we needed to keep them confined until they learned where home was, otherwise they would roam away. After three months it was time to let them out, and take our chances on Spencer’s instinct to flee, but they seemed happy to stay with us and in the evenings made their (separate) homes high up in the gum trees, safe from predators.

  The first time we ever saw Spencer display, in early October, was a monumental occasion, though thanks to his cramped cage at the pet shop a lot of his lovely feathers were broken and tatty. He’s a bird of breathtaking beauty and the dance he does to woo Kate is spectacular in itself. In autumn he loses all his tail feathers, only to have longer ones emerge the following spring. By nature, peafowl are very skittish so we’ve never really had the chance to get close to them or bond, but Spencer loves displaying for people so often shows off in front of our impressed guests.

  Our first summer with the birds, Kate sat on six eggs. Peafowl sit patiently for up to five weeks, only leaving the eggs for something to eat and to ward off potential enemies in a very vocal and impressive run about the property. Kate hatched four of her eggs on our friend Lachlan’s birthday in March and we assumed she would not need any help from us, but then the beautiful little chicks began to die. By day three we knew it was time to intervene and decided to remove the chicks from Kate so we could look after them in a cage inside our villa. Separating a mother bird from her chicks is something you will only try once. Kate was beside herself, running around calling out for the chicks and the whole scene was so distressing we decided to bring them back together. I was pretty adept at the tractor and other equipment, but I just couldn’t master the art of being an unfeeling farmer when it came to animal welfare.

  Jeff built Kate a separate little home inside the chicken pen. But when another chick died we re-thought the situation and brought Kate inside the shed with her two remaining chicks, and went and bought a heat lamp to keep them warm through the chilly autumn nights. The following day yet another chick died which left Kate with just one, the strongest we supposed, named Freddie by Sophia. It wasn’t long until Freddie grew to be as large as her mother and it became a lovely sight watching them patrol the property together, or coming up to our window begging for some of Leroy’s cat biscuits.

  Jump forward a year and Kate was again sitting on six eggs. This time she had chosen to roost under the house and we assumed the eggs would be vulnerable to goannas b
ut decided to let nature take its course. I was watering the orchard on the day of our twelfth anniversary in February when she emerged with six chicks. We immediately swung into action and cornered Kate into the cat carrier, each chick quickly followed. They spent two nights under a lamp inside the house then were moved to a large covered lean-to next to the shed and we watched them anxiously. This time none of them died. Finally we’d mastered how to help Kate see them through.

  There was a small gap in the top of the wall of the lean-to and one of the chicks escaped one day and flew straight down to the bush in front of one of the villas. I couldn’t find it and assumed the little chick would perish pretty quickly without its heat lamp or Kate to keep it warm. Two days later it returned, but refused to be caught. Freddie heard the chick’s squawks and flew down to tend to it. We watched her fly up into the tree and down again, over and over, trying to show her little sibling how it was done, but eventually the chick gave up and flew away. Surely this would spell its end? But two days later, it had not only returned but had found its way back inside to be with Kate.

  This adventuresome chick was white, one of two. At the end of their first three months, when we’d originally planned to sell all of them, we decided instead to keep the two white chicks. Jeff named them Tom and Shelley for the actors in his favourite film/lifestyle inspiration, The Money Pit. I suppose it was better than naming them Mary and J. Blige but I’d secretly been hoping to name them Meryl and Jack from my favourite film, Heartburn.

  By her third season, we were confident that Kate would allow us to help her through to hatching but close to the date we noticed she was limping. Poor Kate had broken her toe, which made sitting on those eggs all day very uncomfortable. I called Dr Alex at Sugarloaf and between us we agreed the best course of action was to leave Kate until the eggs hatched. Whether it was because of her gimpy foot, or thanks to Tom and Shelley, on hatching day, three of her eight eggs had been broken and contained dead chicks, and Kate abandoned two more eggs so she was left with only three chicks, one white and two coloured.