The Chicken Snake

When I was a child, growing up in rural Kentucky, we actually lived on a miniature farm of sorts. Our house had been built before the Civil War, so it was a grand, gracious home with tall ceilings and ornate trim around the doors and fireplace. Almost every home in Kentucky has a huge front porch with a swing, and ours was no exception. Even though we lived in the town of Woodbury, we had a couple of acres, complete with hen house, barn, old brick smoke house, shop and garage. We had room to roam! My parents would plant humongous gardens every year, which the indentured servants/ children had to tend. We also owned:
A few goats, which we milked (and then later bar-b-qued – delicious!)
One sheep that my Mom got wool from to spin on her spinning wheel, (Yes, she really did that.)
Assorted outdoor cats
And my dog, Ladybug, a small collie mix.
And then there were the chickens…. We must have had ten or twelve of the beasts, and each one would produce an egg every day. It was my job, each morning, to go and gather them for our family’s consumption. I cannot express to you how much I hated gathering the eggs! Whenever I opened the gate on the wire enclosure of the chicken yard, the hens and roosters would all pop their little heads up and then freeze. I would slowly enter and latch the gate behind me, trying to keep my back to the fence. Then I would edge my way towards the coop, carefully placing each step, trying not to enrage the creatures. It was so eerie, the only sound would be the occasion ‘skriiitch’ of a little hooked chicken hoof on the hard dirt. I could feel their beady little black eyes boring holes in me as I edged toward the hen house. My heart would be racing and my palms sweating – my Gawd, I was terrified of them!
As soon as I entered the coop, I knew that attack was imminent, and would try to grab the eggs as fast as I could. But there was only one door on the hen house, and once I was inside, there was no escape. Now, I had been gathering the eggs every day for years, but the way the hens reacted, you would have thought that this was the first time a human had entered their domain. As soon as I was inside, they would immediately begin to squawk shrilly and rush the hen house, where they would swarm me like bees! They would jump up on me and peck and scratch, sending feathers flying everywhere! I would try to protect myself, but I was outnumbered 12 to 1, so my only hope of salvation was to get the eggs and get the Hell out of Dodge! The din inside the little building would be deafening: the demon-possessed hens were screeching and squawking, and I was flailing about, shouting and cursing, trying to grabs eggs and then fight my way back through the enemy lines to safety. When I could at last stagger out of the enclosure and slam the gate shut, the raptors would stick their little ruffled heads out the door and give the chicken equivalent of a snort which I took to mean ‘good riddance!’ Invariably, one or two of the eggs would have been cracked during the melee and so I would have to face the Wrath of Mom when I dragged my mangled body back to the safety of the house. It was a lose/lose situation for me!
This scenario went on for months and months. But then one day I noticed that there were not as many eggs as usual. Mom accused me of using them for ammunition against my attackers, but I assured her I was innocent. For the next few days, careful tabs were kept on exactly how many eggs were harvested and the results were definite: our egg supply had dwindled significantly.
My Mom decided to investigate and would sit on the front porch in the evening to watch what transpired at the hen house. Just as the sun was setting one evening there arose a din from the chicken coop. Mom raced down there and opened the door to the hen house and, sure enough, there was the culprit: a huge, black chicken snake was disappearing out a crack near the base of the back wall. Mom returned to the porch and told me what she had seen. Then she looked at me solemnly for a moment and said, “I’m going to have to tell your Dad.”
Let me first go on record as saying that my father is a real man’s man! He can hunt, fish, trap and lumberjack with the best of them. No one on earth could ever accuse my father of being anything other than a red-blooded, All - American male. But he is absolutely terrified of snakes ... doesn’t matter if they are big or little, lethal or harmless: if my Dad catches sight of a snake anywhere in his immediate vicinity he will begin to leap like Baryshnikov, all the while screaming at the top of his lungs for my Mom to rescue him. I always thought it was hilarious that my big, strong Dad would shoot straight up in the air every time I hollered “Snake!” Of course, what goes up must come down, and when he caught me, I’d pay, but the effect was very satisfying to a smart-alec, tomboy-ish 12 year old like me, and well worth the cost!
So when my Mom said she was going to tell my Dad about the snake, I immediately had a feeling of foreboding. My parents spent the next few evenings watching the hen house, and they soon realized that the snake seemed to time his visit so that he would be finished with supper and home before it was completely dark. They shaped their plans accordingly.
The idea was simple enough: Mom and Dad would establish a base camp just inside the gate of the chicken yard and wait there until the snake made his presence known. Then my Mom would jerk open the hen house door, spring inside and to the right, leaving the entry unobstructed for my Dad. Mom would then shine the flashlight onto the target as my Dad leapt inside, shouldered the shotgun and blasted the thief to smithereens. It looked good on paper, and since my Mom was going to be right beside him (and he was carrying a gun), my Dad signed on. They agreed to put the plan into action the following night.
They reconnoitered the subsequent evening on the front porch just as the sun began to dip below the hills. Mom stepped outside carrying the big flashlight, and behind her came Dad. He was carrying the shotgun, alright, but he also had on his hunting vest, with enough ammo strapped on it to defend against a native uprising!
“This can’t be good!” I whispered to my brother, Bo, as they headed off to the hen house. I had declined their invitation to watch the ambush, electing instead to stay on the porch and ‘watch the young uns’. Mom and Dad eased into the enclosure, latched the gate and settled down to wait. Minutes began to tick by, and I was about ready to go watch TV when I heard the chickens begin to squawk and flail about. In the waning light I watched my parents glide noiselessly to the henhouse doorway. My Dad gave my Mom the nod, and she sprang into action. In a move that would have made Rambo proud, my Mom jerked the henhouse door off its hinges and jumped inside and to the right, as planned. She whipped the flashlight up and the yellow shaft of light caught the black culprit, oozing his way up the plank that the chickens used to reach the nest boxes. Immediately my Dad sprang inside like a tiger, shouldered his weapon – and the flashlight went out.
For what seemed like an eternity, all I could hear over the sound of the shotgun blasts was what seemed to be a young girl’s shrill screams. Then I heard my mother yelling ”For the love of Mike, Randall, stop screaming!” I ran to the hen house just as Mom managed to get the flashlight to come back on. There stood my Dad, white as a ghost and shaking from head to foot, both barrels of the shotgun glowing red in the dim light. There were pieces of chicken bodies everywhere, and the walls of the hen house looked like it was made of Swiss cheese. Evidently when the flashlight went out, my Dad panicked and tried to blast every shadow that moved. My quick thinking Mom had simply froze like a stature, knowing that eventually he would need to reload, and she could have the chance to escape. We helped my Dad back up to the house, and Mom said we would wait until in the morning to survey the damage.
When we returned to the scene of the crime the next day, we found a few survivors, but there was no sign of the snake, not even a scale. The only evidence we found was a thin furrow that was almost burned through the dirt and over the hillside where evidently the snake had shot out to freedom when Dad started blasting away. The remaining hens were nervous wrecks and not a one of them ever laid another egg. In fact, to my immense satisfaction, they wound up in our freezer before the summer was over! The hen house was beyond repair, so my Mom resigned herself to having to use store bought eggs and declared that “We will raise chickens no more forever!”
From that day forth, I have never suffered abuse at the hand of a chicken again. Chicken snake, wherever you are, God bless you!