by Deb Hunt
‘Are you sure this will work?’ I asked.
‘Why not?’
‘Look,’ I said, spinning the broom handle and hoping he could visualise the problem.
‘We need to fix it in place,’ he said, heading for the shed and emerging moments later wearing safety goggles and carrying a drill.
‘I’m not sure a round pole is the answer,’ I said diplomatically. ‘Won’t they be happier on a flat piece of timber?’
CC started drilling. I deduced (correctly) that his mission was to get the chook shed set up as quickly as possible so he could get back to the tennis on television. I tapped him on the shoulder and shouted above the noise of the drill.
‘Is this what you used before? A broom handle?’
He didn’t answer, which meant no. Even if he did manage to fix the broom handle in place it looked alarmingly thin, more suited to a budgie than a fully grown chook. I rummaged through the rubbish I’d rescued from the tip again and found a flat piece of timber the right size, which I jammed into place on the opposite corner. ‘Just so they have an option,’ I said brightly, not wanting to discourage CC’s efforts. We still had to sort out roosting and nesting and he was itching to get back to the tennis, I could tell.
‘Now, what about roosting?’ I said.
‘Frosty, they’ll roost in there,’ he said, pointing to the chook shed.
‘OK,’ I said, still none the wiser. ‘That just leaves nesting then.’
‘That’s what the crate was for,’ he said, retreating back inside to catch the last of the tennis.
I retrieved the crate, which I’d thrown into the trailer-load of rubbish that was going back to the tip (against my better judgement), filled it with straw and placed it on its side in the chook shed. It was all so marvellously rustic and makeshift in a laid-back Aussie outback kind of way. I was starting to fit in, starting to belong in Broken Hill. The chooks wouldn’t lay eggs for another ten weeks but that didn’t matter; while we waited we could enjoy the sight of their beautiful brown feathers and red combs as they wandered through the garden. I charged my camera, ready to take photos of the flock quietly pecking at the lawn, and googled Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recipes for eggs. I was feeling quietly pleased with myself. Food scraps wouldn’t go to waste anymore and people who came to visit would say, ‘Oh look, you’ve got chooks,’ and I’d smile and say, ‘Yes, free range, of course.’
The image of rural bliss lasted until lunchtime on the first day the chooks arrived, which was as long as it took for them to discover that tender young vegetables tasted better than grass. I spent most of my time slamming through the screen door, sliding across a patio smeared with chicken shit and racing across the garden to stop them eating the sweet peas, broad beans, beetroot, lettuce and cabbage I’d been nurturing in the newly planted vegetable plot.
Chooks are voracious feeders. Once they discovered there were baby vegetables on the menu, they ignored the lawn and got stuck into the leafy greens, producing vast quantities of manure as a result. There was crap everywhere, mostly outside the back door because the canny chooks worked out that food scraps occasionally emerged from there. When they weren’t destroying the vegetable garden, they hung around the back door, crapping on the patio as they waited for me to emerge.
‘Happy, healthy chooks lay more eggs,’ CC said, standing at the window with his coffee and surveying the damage.
I rigged wire mesh around the broad beans and the chooks pushed their beaks through it, pecking the young plants until they were nothing but bare stalks. I tried finer mesh and the chooks worked out how to get under the barrier but not back out so they had to be rescued before panic set in and they trampled the plants they hadn’t got round to eating. Once the chooks had worked their way through the broad beans, they turned their attention to the sweet peas – an old-fashioned variety, the seeds bought online at some considerable expense and nurtured in a pot for the past two months. Daily watering had encouraged tendrils to twine their way through a painted lattice nailed to the side of an old dog kennel. It was all looking oh so House & Garden magazine. I had swathed the sweet peas in fine white fabric, which kept them safe until sliding across the patio one morning I noticed the fabric was bulging and writhing. Four plump birds were concealed underneath, gorging themselves on every sweet pea I’d raised from seed until they were nothing but stalks too.
Strewn with wire mesh and covered in crap, the garden looked like a battlefield, the plants half eaten and the ground scraped into craters. Chooks can dig deeper than dogs. I spent my days scraping chicken shit off the patio, hosing down the paths and running round the vegetable beds, clapping and waving my hands, shouting ‘Get off there!’, causing the chooks to scatter in a flighty bundle of feathers, waddling and squawking until they settled back down to peck at the lawn. The minute my back was turned they were under the wire again.
Naming them was futile as they looked identical; even counting the pointy bits on their combs didn’t help. One had a smidge of white on her feathers and she hung back when the others rushed the back door, so the chooks were dubbed Chook, Chook, Chook and Lonesome.
The girls were happy, relaxed and carefree and I was a bag of nerves. Ticks were a potential problem in that part of northern New South Wales so I had a routine of dusting and de-worming. I was on the lookout for fleas and signs of coccidiosis too; according to the pamphlet it could cause anaemia, depression, low production and mortality.
Depression? I don’t think so. By now the chooks were surprisingly choosy about what they would and wouldn’t eat. Of the giant smorgasbord of treats laid out in front of them, they ignored celery, parsley and radish but everything else in the vegetable patch was fair game. They liked cheese, meat, bread, salad and all the yellow and black seeds from the chook feed, but they wouldn’t eat the grey or brown pellets (boring bits that made up eighty per cent of the feed).
And low production? The chooks were meant to start laying any time from twenty weeks so I made a note on the calendar and weeks twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two and twenty-three passed without any sign of an egg. I skulked close by whenever one of them settled into the dirt under a bush, aware I was in danger of re-awakening my stalking tendencies. CC was quietly amused by the whole palaver and wisely said nothing.
Early one morning we got a call from a man a few doors down. ‘Have you lost one of your chooks?’ he asked. I looked out of the window and counted the number of fat feather bundles, partially hidden in what remained of the vegetable patch.
‘No,’ I said, somewhat wistfully. ‘They’re all still here.’
‘One turned up in my garden and I think it might be a stray. Do you want to try to incorporate it into your flock?’
I’m a soft-hearted pushover when it comes to a stray looking for a good home so I put my hand over the mouthpiece and explained the situation to CC. I was relying on him to shake his head and say no. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘One more can’t harm.’ There was a suggestion of a smile on his face and it looked like he might be about to remind me that happy, healthy chickens produced more eggs. I could tell he was weighing up the consequences. In the end he played safe. ‘Shall I fetch a box?’ he said.
Given the Christmas turkey-like proportions of our well-fed chooks we took a large cardboard box but the stray turned out to be half the size of a dove, a small white bird with patches of blue grey feathers under its scared-looking eyes, trapped under a net that the neighbour had thrown over it. There was no way I could refuse to take it (although how such a small bird would cope with the four buxom beasts in our back garden was less certain).
‘It’s a bantam,’ said CC as we drove home with a small scared bird inside an overly large box. ‘It will hold its own; bantams are fiery creatures, you watch.’
We fed the little bantam bits of bacon and debated how best to introduce it to the Red Leghorn crosses, all of which were more than three times its size. CC fav
oured the direct approach – shut them in the cage together – and I advocated a more gradual ‘getting to know you’ program. The compromise (although goodness knows why we thought this would work) was to shut the bantam into the girls’ quarters and leave them on the outside. They went wild, enraged that their personal quarters had been so brutally invaded. Standing outside the coop, they tried to attack the bantam through the wire mesh and the little bird immediately dropped a wing to one side, as if it was wounded.
‘See that?’ said CC. ‘Male bantams do that when they want to mate. Not even half their size and he wants to mount them,’ he added with pride.
I wasn’t so sure. If the little bantam did want to mount the girls I doubted he would get very far; they looked like they wanted to rip his head off. We let the bantam out, protected him as the girls went in for the kill and he flew over our heads to hide in a vine growing over the pergola. At least if he could fly he might survive. The girls kicked around the dust inside the cage, squawking and scratching with noisy displeasure, so we left food and water where the bantam could reach it and shut the girls in. ‘Bertie the Bantam, what a guy,’ said CC, staring up at him.
The arrival of a fifth bird meant reinforcements were needed. What was left of the broad beans and sweet peas were already ring-fenced with wire mesh and tightly encased in shadecloth but the main vegetable patch was still vulnerable. I had a solution.
‘Hold that and don’t move,’ I said to CC. He was holding a spool of wire, which I unrolled and fixed to the shed at one side of the garden and the carport at the other (high enough so neither of us would slit our throats when pulling up a radish). I threaded fifteen metres of expandable bird netting along it. The white curtain cut the garden in half, with the protected vegetable patch on one side and free-range grazing on the other. The garden looked like a giant stage set.
There was a hushed silence, not unlike the stillness that settles on a theatre audience before a performance begins.
The chooks hesitated, clearly mystified by the curtain. The suggestion of a breeze whispered through the grass and the flimsy netting lifted into the air. Curtain up! The chooks rushed the stage, pushing into the limelight like born performers. I shooed them off and pegged the curtain with rocks and old plant pots until Bertie worked out how to squeeze under the pegs. His lone achievement sent the girls into a frenzy of jealous rage and they pecked and scratched at the line of rocks and stones as I rushed back and forth, like a general on the front line, checking defences, plugging holes and extracting the chooks that managed to squeeze through the gaps at the side.
When all that remained of the garden was hidden under bent wire mesh, torn shadecloth and muddy white netting, I finally admitted defeat.
‘I thought you said free range –’
‘Shut up and pass me that hammer.’
CC helped me fence off a ten-metre square section of the rose garden, effectively ending the fantasy of chooks roaming free. And still we didn’t have a single egg.
*
The girls waddled through the rose garden in a clutch, Lonesome never more than a couple of feet behind. Bertie made no attempt to mate with them but he did desperately want to be friends. The girls wanted nothing to do with him. They saw off any attempt at friendship with ferocious stabs to the top of his head and he fluttered away, only to repeat the attempt moments later.
The fence was high enough so the girls couldn’t get out, and low enough so Bertie could fly in and out at will, which was probably the only thing that saved him from certain death.
Several times a day the chooks rejected his overtures and several times a day he went back for more, until he had a permanent scab on top of his head, none of which deterred him from trying again. No matter how often he tried he never succeeded. I felt a certain affinity with Bertie the Bantam.
The chooks weren’t Bertie’s only problem; a greater risk to his safety was next door’s cat. At night Bertie roosted in a tangle of branches underneath the pergola, high enough to be safe from predators. At dawn each morning he fluttered down to the chicken coop and hung around outside, waiting for another attempt to make friends with the girls when I let them out. Several times I’d got up to let the chooks out and discovered next door’s cat peering over the roof at the unsuspecting Bertie. It was only a matter of time before the cat pounced.
I had a plan.
Dawn hadn’t broken when I nudged CC awake. ‘It’s time,’ I whispered. We pulled on slippers, shrugged on dressing-gowns and eased open the back door, being careful not to let the screen door bang. I pointed at the tap and CC nodded, padding across the dew-soaked lawn as I reached for the hose I’d left uncoiled the night before.
‘Is he there?’ CC mouthed.
I risked a peek around the corner. Crouching low in the pre-dawn light, silhouetted on top of the chook shed, was an outline of black fur. We weren’t a moment too soon – poor innocent Bertie was scratching in the dirt below. I gave CC the thumbs up, picked up the hose, positioned myself at the corner and raised my arm. When I let it fall that would be the signal for him to turn on the tap.
I signalled, he turned the tap and with straight arms and a strong grip (I haven’t ever seen a Quentin Tarantino movie but I know the drill) I leapt around the corner and squeezed the trigger. The water pressure was high and I was firing at close range; that cat would be flung in the air and shot back where it belonged. Take that, you mangy, stalking intruder, get back over the fence where you belong, you dirty murdering son of a . . . A gentle drift of rain fell from the gun, misting the ground at my feet. The cat yawned, arched its back and disappeared across the neighbour’s roof with a dismissive flick of its tail. CC appeared at my side and stared at the spray gun in my hand, set to mist instead of stun. ‘Flaw in the plan there, Frosty,’ he said.
My frustration with the lack of egg production mounted until I heard the story of an Aboriginal couple trying to get pregnant. They succeeded only when an older, wiser woman slipped a ceramic egg with magical powers under their bed. I had an egg-shaped souvenir from the Daydream Mine near Silverton so I nestled the fake egg on a bed of straw inside the chook shed. Two days later there was a perfect replica lying on the straw, an unblemished, still-warm gift from one of the girls. The laying drought was broken in spectacular fashion and before long they were all at it, squawking loudly to announce the arrival of that day’s batch. It was unexpectedly moving and I marvelled at the magic of it. The daily egg collection was worth all the disruption and mess.
Then something happened that filled me with wonder – a surprise I could never have anticipated. It was a simple but startling discovery that made me stop and realise something: if I think I know what to expect, how can I ever be surprised? If I cleared my mind of pre-conceived ideas, a whole new set of possibilities opened up, like the possibility that CC and I might be meant for each other, or that Broken Hill was a beautiful place and I just hadn’t been able to see it.
Weeding one of the garden beds early one morning, in a corner of the garden I rarely visited, I pushed aside a thicket of lavender bushes and found Bertie sitting on a nest of squashed daisies. He didn’t flutter away as he normally would when I approached and I was able to pick him up. He was a soft, featherweight bundle, lighter than I thought he’d be, but the real surprise was what he’d been hiding. Lying on the ground underneath him, gathered into a small neat mound, were seventeen tiny white eggs, so delicate and unlike anything the girls had laid that they clearly belonged to him. Her. I carefully put Bertie down and gathered the warm eggs one by one, cradling them in the fold of my shirt to carry them indoors. The next day, in exactly the same place, I found Bertie sitting contentedly on another small white egg. Bertie wasn’t a boy at all.
He was a girl.
*
The arrival of chooks settled me into a daily routine that included a couple of hours tending the vegetable patch, where basil, rocket, mint, chives, coriand
er, parsley, rosemary and thyme quickly filled the bare patches of sun-baked earth. When I ran out of room, Joe, who normally cut the lawn and tended the trees and roses (which explained why they did so well), helped me clear another patch and together we removed five wheelbarrows of heavy stone, adding compost and manure to the sandy soil that was already rich with minerals and crawling with worms. Not as barren as I thought, then. I planted onion sets, capsicum, melon, tomatoes, beetroot, peas, broad beans, pumpkin, zucchini, cabbage, radish and lettuce. Once the chooks were safely penned, it all grew with astonishing speed. There’s no shortage of sunlight in Broken Hill and no lack of water either; the Menindee Lakes system (three times the size of Sydney Harbour) supplied the water and since it evaporated faster than it could be used, the only restriction was cost (sorry, CC).
Broken Hill had welcomed me with unexpected generosity. Lynne Gall, a member of the Broken Hill Women’s Auxiliary, whose husband, John, is a grazier and long-standing RFDS board member, brought me a box of produce from Langawirra Station: jars of homemade jam and relish, honey from bees fed on red gum and black box at Coogee Lake, ripe tomatoes and clumps of strawberry plants dug up from her garden, ready to be transplanted into mine.
I came home one day to find two jars of homemade apricot jam on the doorstep, like liquid amber held in glass. I kept expecting a phone call and tried calling a few people to see who might have deposited the jars but it was an unsolved mystery. A gift that looked for no reward. Isn’t that the sweetest gift of all? When I opened one of the jars it was like releasing a genie and I inhaled the scent of summer in those sun-ripened apricots. Weeks later, Joe asked for the jars back and I found out his wife, Marlene, had made the jam.
Broken Hill felt like a town that wasn’t stopping when I first arrived but that’s because I wasn’t stopping. I was planning to shoot through and get out at the first opportunity, and what a mistake that would have been. I would have missed the beauty of jaw-dropping sunsets and changeable weather that had me leaping to my feet like a ticket holder at a Rolling Stones concert, applauding the audacity, the bravado, the noise and fury. When weather blew through it left behind blue skies that went on forever and a silent sense of belonging to something big.