Mr. Cruickshank and the Chickens
Our neighbour rolls into our yard in his red Chevrolet pick-up, stops, and shuts off the engine. His bent, sun-tanned arm hangs out the open window. A toothpick dangles from the left corner of an impish grin, as he gazes upon us.
Mr. Cruickshank’s and his wife Mona’s daughter Glenda —she of the impossibly long wavy hair, parted in the middle— babysits my sisters and me. Two of the Cruickshank’s sons, Dave and Gary, can take apart a car, then put it back together, in the space of a weekend.
The Cruikshanks are respected local farmers in our Clearview community, just south of Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. We, on the other hand, are a family of well-meaning interlopers —city slickers trying it on as farmers, trying on pretty much anything a farm might have to offer, as it turned out. The Cruikshanks have a big shed full of machinery, tools, dirt-bikes, and snowmobiles; when our little shed gets finished, we’ll park our bicycles, the ones with the purple banana seats that were the coollest back in town.
Proper farmers are busy. But —if they grow wise and methodical enough— they also come to command time. There’s a time to sow, tend, and harvest; a time to cut, to assess the dew as much as the forecast, to bring out the rake and turn. A time to bail and stack. There’s a time to feed and to provide dry straw bedding. Time to see if that pair of turkeys, the ones who live to fuck in the loft of the barn, need more water. Time to lace up your winter boots and go curling. Time to savour a rum and coke.
Parked in the yard again, Mr. Cruickshank knows what to expect from us. His whole being expresses bemusement, lightly suppressed. It wasn’t as if we didn’t lend a hand whenever we could, but the truth of the matter is that Bob Cruickshank was our local saviour. Our cattle were always getting out and running wild. We’d be stranded when the creek in Spring overcame our make-shift bridge. And there was the time Mr. Cruickshank helped us extinguish a raging brush fire when my father’s stubble-burning met the wind and spun out of control.
But this time, things are quiet. He just sits in his truck and listens as we —my sisters and me, arrayed beneath his truck’s open window— tell him about the chickens.
The ones we keep in a hen house and a chicken run over by the tree line, not far from the barn with the fucking turkeys on top. They lay so many eggs that we forgive them all the manure we fork away. They have lots of room to roam and peck outside, albeit within a fence, lest, each chicken in turn becomes coyote dinner.
Some of our chickens, the ones who most distinguish themselves to us, have old-school (Anglo) names.
There’s Jezebel and Mabel, and Mildred and Betty. And then there’s fearsome Gus, the Rooster.
My sisters and I watch the chickens for hours. Their fellow creatureliness compels. Their communications and interactions and avoidances. Their unmistakably sharp memories and fears. Their concessions to mundanity. Their bright relationships, their brewing animosities; their care for one another and their violence.
“Pecking order,” hegemony, hierarchy, aren’t the half of it: this is what we children —in our own way— try to explain to our be-trucked interlocutor from above.
Mr. Cruickshank, who of course has chickens of his own, shakes his head gently at our revelations. His toothpick twitches as we unveil the particularities of chickenworld.
“You give them names?!,”” he ask-exclaims in mock disbelief, the skin around his eyes creasing. “They kind of talk, you say!”, as little tears come to his twinkling eyes.
“And did you say Gus?,” Mr. Cruickshank asks . . .
“That rooster of yours . . . He’s an ornery cuss!”
◇◇◇
I began quite cheered by the radio attention afforded popular naturalist and author Sy Montgomery a few weeks ago in the United States.1 By her call for a reconsideration of the most underestimated of creatures. By her accessible style, and her ways of treating but also moving beyond an exposure of the cruelty of factory-farming regimes. Montgomery reminds of the individuality and social intelligence of more-than-humans, and thus of chickens. And she contends persuasively that chickens prove especially “good company” for their most misguided and increasingly fretful of fellow earthlings, namely ourselves.
I enjoyed the emphasis on chickens’ collective self-defense and valiance, too.
But there was something about at least the radio interview’s most optimistic flourishes that also felt romanticising and even wrong-headed. Something that made me ask about other things. About what humans associate with chickens. About hens collectively. About roosters atop weather vanes, about cocks for fighting and gambling, and as symbols, national, bourgeois, or otherwise . . .
The radio programmes take me back to the farmyard.
“If a rooster attacks, one of Montgomery’s chicken-keeping neighbours counsels, “do not run. Do not attack him back . . .” But, rather, “. . . pick him up and cuddle him, carry him around with you as you do your chores. . . . you probably should put his feet in some kind of a towel or a blanket to keep those spurs from hurting you, and it would be smart not to keep his beak too close to your face, but by the end of the day, you're going to have a rooster who loves you, and they can be like the best friends you ever had.”2
Good luck picking up Gus!, I think to myself, remembering. “I remember Gus, too!,” texts my mother the other day, responding to my spate of chicken-thinking.
I remember Mr. Cruickshank. His truck and toothpick, those eyes. His gentle bemusement as he listened in to the chicken universe offered by me and my sisters. We’d made those chickens of childhood into our thinking tools, and also friends of a sort. But our vantage, and the entire experience of contemplating Gus and the rest of the chickens’ predicaments, their behaviours, and their relations with all kinds of others —with other hens and roosters, with potential predators like coyotes and foxes, hawks and owls, with our dogs, with my father and mother, with my sisters and me— became about more than simply the chickens being conveniently accommodated to our needs. The spurs and beaks, the wild wonder you could see —so closely, if fence-artificially— punctured all that, encouraging wild wonder and more than a dollop of humility. As Bob Cruickshank (1918-2009) understood in his way, the towel —that overlying blanket of yours and mine, the act of covering up— ultimately doesn’t work.
* watercolours and ink, and photographs by Kenneth Mills, except for the “Rooster” by Heidi V. Scott, reproduced with her permission.
“In 'What the Chicken Knows,' Sy Montgomery explores the extraordinary nature of the ordinary fowl,” Here & Now, WBUR/National Public Radio, 8 November 2024; and “Sy Montgomery on the Brains Behind the Cluck,” Living on Earth, National Public Radio, week of 1 November 2024. See Montgomery, What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World’s Most Familiar Bird (Simon & Schuster, 2024).
“Sy Montgomery on the Brains Behind the Cluck,” Living on Earth, National Public Radio, week of 1 November 2024.
What a perfect piece of writing. Lessons from chickens - or from those who really know them!
Aww. This is lovely, Ken. Nostalgic.