One Chicken, Two Chicken

I live in a rural area. On my street, we are probably the only people who don't have a collection of farm animals. We do have two ferocious, indoor felines who regularly let the bird population know, if that window glass wasn't there, they'd be dead.

The collection of birds at our house is pretty song-birdy. When we lived in the actual desert, our yard was a stretch of dirt with some cactus. All sorts of birds appeared, coveys of quail, roadrunners, mourning doves, in addition to the song birds. The cats loved that house. It was always sunny in the desert, and there were many invading birds to chirp at before falling asleep in the blistering heat.

Now, our yard has actual trees, and the birds are usually so high in them, nothing that exciting passes by the windows. So imagine my surprise when I was sitting on the couch one day, and the grey cat leapt into the air before sucking himself to the window, ears flat, eyes huge.

He was staring out at the edge of our yard. I followed his gaze and saw, gasp, a red chicken.

As noted at the start of this, we do not have any animals beyond the twenty-two pounds of domesticated shorthairs. This was not our chicken.

I have never had a chicken, but I figured, that chicken was probably supposed to be in the yard to the north of us, but that neighbor was pretty mean, so I wasn't going to go to his door to tell him his chicken was out.

For the next several weeks, every day around the same time in the late afternoon, the chicken would appear. The cats initially were on high alert, but after a while, the invading chicken, which would dig in all the areas I'd ground clothed, became old news.

One day, I watched the chicken tear into the wood shavings around the junipers I'd planted, and I decided I was sick of letting this uninvited ave tear up the weeks of work I'd spent laying the ground cloth. It was time to escalate this fight. I marched outside and into the front yard.

"Hey!" I yelled.

My husband was still on the couch, watching me through the window with the cats.

"Hey! Go dig up some other person's garden."

The chicken, upon seeing me, began an Olympic speed walking attempt, head down, neck bumping, as it clucked angrily at me. I guess I hadn't really known what to expect, but I didn't think it would be so fast. I began to fast walk after it.

"Go mess up someone else's yard!"

This was a fast chicken. It started to zig and zag, and I realized, catching this chicken was probably more work than it was worth. I pursued it a little longer, and it popped around the ramshackle fence that demarcated my yard from its.

Feeling pretty satisfied I'd run it off, I turned around to go back inside through my back door. I stepped onto my back porch, looked out across my yard, a major portion of which I had painstakingly ground clothed and wood chipped and...

The red chicken was back there, digging into that ground cloth.

I whirled around and checked the area where I had last seen the chicken in the front yard. It was back around the fence digging in the wood chips.

There were two red chickens.

For weeks I'd thought there was one.

Struggling to understand this, I stepped off the back porch and walked at the red chicken in the back yard. Then I saw there was another red chicken just beyond it. I looped around to the front of the house. There were now two in the front yard as well. There were four chickens on my property! I circled again into my back yard, and walked toward the fence that I shared with the chicken owner, and through it I could see the chicken run. There were at least eight more red chickens in the run.

There were red chickens everywhere. For weeks I'd thought I had just been seeing the one. But turned out my neighbor had at least a dozen, all the same color.

The chickens had gaslit me. The psychological warfare... It felt so extreme.

I left the chickens, still viscously ripping through my wood chips, and went back inside.

"There are billions of them," I told my husband, my voice breathy like I'd pulled a Nike and run 26.2 miles to give him this deadly news. "All the same color. There is no battle, they already won the war."

"There are more than one?" he said.

"It's over. They won. They outnumber us. They got into our brains. The victory is theirs."

And after that, we didn't chase the chickens anymore. They came and went as they pleased, and no pests ate our plants.

Sometimes it's best to know when to fight, and when to buy more ground cloth.