Agnes the Red gets a reprieve

A quick recap: Landlady has a big chicken house that used to be a carport, and it contains a dozen or so Brahma chickens that have yet to lay an egg. At the Secret Lair is a chicken yard called the Fortress of Attitude which until a month or so ago contained three Rhode Island Reds. Until that same month ago they were pretty good layers. But then the molt started, and they stopped laying eggs. The Reds had been feather pluckers, but now all three started growing nice new suits of feathers. Then one morning Agnes, the biggest of the three, decided to kill the smallest. Don’t know why. Plucked her ass bald and then started working on the meat. Blood everywhere.

I moved Agnes to the big chicken house, where she was instantly set upon by the Brahmas. They eventually tolerated her living on a shelf in the corner, but she was not allowed on the main floor. This went on for weeks. I couldn’t decide which hen was for the stew pot: The biggest, who had caused the problem, or the littlest, who isn’t a particularly good layer anyway. Meanwhile things in both chicken houses settled into a tolerable routine, except that nobody was laying any @#$% eggs.

Two days ago, things started to change. I came into the Big Chickenhouse, as I do every day, and Agnes wasn’t on her shelf. I didn’t see her anywhere, but then the Chickenhouse was near empty. All the hens filed back in from their yard, and Agnes was … among them. Nobody was singing kumbaya, she didn’t seem to have been invited to any little hen slumber parties, but nobody was trying to kill her. A rather peremptory and half-hearted peck sent her back to her shelf, where she waited for me to deliver room service.

Yesterday: Same thing. She was down off her shelf. Not mingling, but not running for her life.

Today: No sign of her. No sign of her anywhere. I looked in every crevice. I opened the door to the yard and looked all around there. No Agnes. Not dead, not alive, not there.

Agnes dead, I could have lived with. Agnes completely missing was a serious problem. It meant a security hole a hen could find, that I and Landlady and every predator in the desert had missed. Everybody else seemed to be here. What I was (not) seeing pretty much had to be completely impossible. Therefore the little red hen with the really bad attitude was here somewhere. I looked again.

And I found her, in a milk crate on the top shelf, far away from everybody, contentedly sitting on two fresh brown eggs.

On a hunch I examined the other nesting boxes. And in one of them I found two more eggs: These had clearly not come from Agnes, with whose product I’m quite well acquainted. These were sad, undersized things with shells so thin they were both already broken. One or more of the other young hens is/are finally starting to make cackleberries. The long drought is over, and Agnes the Red is leading the way. She has escaped the stew pot for now.