Part 10

February passed gently into March, and my chickens began to hatch. Every man must raise chickens at some period of his life, and I was starting in for my turn now. Hay had been my specialty heretofore, making two blades grow where there had been one very thin one. But once your two acres are laid down, and you have a stump full of skunks, near by, against the ravages of the June-bugs, then there is nothing for you but chickens or something, while you wait. I got Rhode Island Reds, fancy exhibition stock,--for what is the use of chickens if you cannot take them to the show?

The chickens began to hatch, little downy balls of yellow, with their pedigrees showing right through the fuzz. How the sixty of them grew! I never lost one. And now the second batch of sitters would soon be ready to come off.

Then one day, at the morning count, five of one hen’s brood were gone! I counted again. I counted all the other broods. Five were gone!

My nearest neighbor had cats, mere barn cats, as many as ten, at the least. I had been suspicious of those cats from the first. So I got a gun. Then more of my chickens disappeared. I could count only forty-seven.

I shifted the coop, wired it in, and stretched a wire net over the top of the run. Nothing could get in, nor could a chicken get out. All the time I was waiting for the cat.

A few nights after the moving of the coop a big hole was dug under the wire fence of the run, another hole under the coop, and the entire brood of Rhode Island Reds was taken.

Then I took the gun and cut across the pasture to my neighbor’s.

“Hard luck,” he said. “It’s a big skunk. Here, you take these traps, and you’ll catch him; anybody can catch a skunk.”

And I did catch him. I killed him, too, in spite of the great scarcity of the creatures. Yet I was sorry, and, perhaps, too hasty; for catching him near the coop was no proof. He might have wandered this way by chance. I should have put him in a bag and carried him down to Valley Swamp and liberated him.

That day, while my neighbor was gone with his milk wagon, I slipped through the back pasture and hung the two traps up on their nail in the can-house.

I went anxiously to the chicken-yard the next morning. All forty came out to be counted. It must have been the skunk, I was thinking, as I went on into the brooding-house, where six hens were still sitting.

One of the hens was off her nest and acting queerly. Her nest was empty! Not a chick, not a bit of shell! I lifted up the second hen in the row, and of her thirteen eggs, only three were left. The hen next to her had five eggs; the fourth hen had four. Forty chickens gone (counting them before they were hatched), all in one night.

I hitched up the horse and drove thoughtfully to the village, where I bought six skunk-traps.

“Goin’ skunkin’ some, this spring,” the store man remarked, as he got me the traps, adding, “Well, they’s some on ’em. I’ve seen a scaac’ty of a good many commodities, but I never yet see a scaac’ty o’ skunks.”

I didn’t stop to discuss the matter, being a trifle uncertain just then as to my own mind, but hurried home with my six traps. Six, I thought, would do to begin with, though I really had no conception of the number of cats (or skunks) it had taken to dispose of the three and one third dozens of eggs (at three dollars a dozen!) in a single night.

Early that afternoon I covered each sitting hen so that even a mouse could not get at her, and fixing the traps, I distributed them about the brooding-house floor; then, as evening came on, I pushed a shell into each barrel of the gun, took a comfortable perch upon a keg in the corner of the house, and waited.

I had come to stay. Something was going to happen. And something did happen, away on in the small hours of the morning, namely--one little skunk. He walked into a trap while I was dozing. He seemed pretty small hunting then, but he looms larger now, for I have learned several more things about skunks than I knew when I had the talk with my neighbor: I have learned, for one thing, that forty eggs, soon to hatch, are just an average meal for the average half-grown skunk.

The catching of these two thieves put an end to the depredations, and I began again to exhibit in my dreams, when one night, while sound asleep, I heard a frightful commotion among the hens. I did the hundred-yard dash to the chicken-house in my unforgotten college form, but just in time to see the skunk cross the moonlit line into the black woods ahead of me.

He had wrought dreadful havoc among the thoroughbreds. What devastation a skunk, single-handed, can achieve in a pen of young chickens beggars all description.

I was glad that it was dead of night, that the world was home and asleep in its bed. I wanted no sympathy. I wished only to be alone, alone in the cool, the calm, the quiet of this serene and beautiful midnight. Even the call of a whippoorwill in the adjoining pasture worried me. I desired to meditate, yet clear, consecutive thinking seemed strangely difficult. I felt like one disturbed. I was out of harmony with this peaceful environment. Perhaps I had hurried too hard, or I was too thinly clothed, or perhaps my feet were cold and wet. I only know, as I stooped to untwist a long and briery runner from about my ankle, that there was great confusion in my mind, and in my spirit there was chaos. I felt myself going to pieces,--I, the nature-lover! Had I not advocated the raising of a few extra hens just for the sake of keeping the screaming hawk in air and the wild fox astir in our scanty picnic groves? And had I not said as much for the skunk? Why, then, at one in the morning should I, nor clothed, nor in my right mind, be picking my barefoot way among the tangled dewberry vines behind the barn, swearing by the tranquil stars to blow the white-striped carcass of that skunk into ten million atoms if I had to sit up all the next night to do it?

One o’clock in the morning was the fiend’s hour. There could be no unusual risk in leaving the farm for a little while in the early evening, merely to go to the bean supper over at the chapel at the Corner. So we were dressed and ready to start, when I spied one of my hens outside the yard, trying to get in.

Hurrying down, I caught her, and was turning back to the barn, when I heard a slow, faint rustling among the bushes behind the hen-house. I listened! Something was moving cautiously through the dead leaves! Tiptoeing softly around, I surprised a large skunk making his way slowly toward the hen-yard fence.

I grabbed a stone and hurled it, jumping, as I let it drive, for another. The flying missile hit within an inch of the creature’s nose, hard upon a large flat rock over which he was crawling. The impact was stunning, and before the old rascal could get to his groggy feet, I had fallen upon him--literally--and done for him.

But I was very sorry. I hope that I shall never get so excited as to fall upon another skunk,--never!

I was picking myself up, when I caught a low cry from the direction of the house--half scream, half shout. It was a woman’s voice, the voice of my wife, I thought. Was something the matter?

“Hurry!” I heard. But how could I hurry? My breath was gone, and so were my spectacles, and other more important things besides, while all about me poured a choking blinding smother. I fought my way out.

“Oh, hurry!”

I was on the jump; I was already rounding the barn, when a series of terrified shrieks issued from the front of the house. An instant more and I had come. But none too soon, for there stood the dear girl, backed into a corner of the porch, her dainty robes drawn close about her, and a skunk, a wee baby of a skunk, climbing confidently up the steps toward her.