Foxes and Fireworks

The dogs were down, and all was warm and toasty. It was a few hours after dusk and all was well. We were tucked in, reading in bed after a nice dinner and a long day. I was enjoying the luxurious, relaxed feeling of being in a good book, slowly sliding down the pleasant glide path into dreamland. Then we heard something.

The sound was faint at first, then came closer, filling the room faintly like evil smoke coming in the corners of the windows. It was a complex, wild howling that sent shivers through us and made us flip down the books and stare at the wall to concentrate.

The yawling wails sounds rose and fell, like death screams for disembodied spirits, or a special effects sound machine being dismantled with a vicious pair of pliers. Yet these were no electronic sound effects. These eerie, scary, wrawling yips and screams were being made by live creatures, unseen, prowling, surrounding us in the darkness.

Even though we were inside our stone fortress, the primeval fear lit up like a mortar shell – it felt like these things could come flying through the doors and windows into our cozy bed. Daisy went on full alert, black fur raised along her spine, watching the entrance. She was dead quiet, eyes and head darting towards any change in the sound. When she doesn’t even growl it’s serious.

It sounded like this:


Being The Man, I got up bravely leapt out of bed and marched out the bedroom door to the hall and over to the door that goes outside. Yanked it open decisively. Wanted to hear better. Find out what this was all about. Instantly the space was filled with loud howling and screaming, wild yips like demonic spirits on holiday. Holy Crap. I’d never heard anything like it before.

Except that I had. Several days before, I’d been out in the field and heard a similar wild sound erupt from the forest just up the hill. Right in broad daylight and chillingly close. It was an exceedingly strange experience, and it stilled me.

Later that day I’d spied Dale, our neighbor farmer who looks like a wizened pirate straight from Central Casting, driving his tractor through a nearby field. I went over to ask if he knew what the hell that was all about. His dull green, 14 foot tall 1,200 horsepower tractor shuddered to a dieselly halt (well I exaggerate –it’s actually only 56 HP – but the wheels are as tall as I am and it’s a damn big machine). Dale shook out a smoke and lit it, looking up the hillside through a squinting eye weathered by thousands of hours in the sun, and drawled, “Coyotes feeding their pups. They get real excited, when Mom and Pop come home with fresh meat. There’s a den of them over t’other side of George’s farm.”

“But it sounded so damn LOUD, Dale!” I was still a little shaken. Just a tad. “Like they were right up there beyond those trees!”

“Prob’ly an echo,” he opined in his typically imperturbable manner. Nothing much gets Dale going unless it’s someone interfering with his farming, and then watch out. We jawed about it for a bit then he said he’d be getting on with his farming. He flashed his brilliant boyish grin, which is always kind of pleasantly jarring on a face that looks like one of those three-toothed gnome dolls made of dried apples topped with wild white hair, and rumbled off.

I recalled this conversation as a fresh crop of fluttering yips penetrated my eardrums. I muttered to myself, “that’s no echo.” These night-prowling hairy scary beings were right there in the yard, invading our space, and scaring the hell out of us.

I pulled on a robe, shoved my feet into my Frogman all-weather neoprene slip-on boots ($44.50 from Duluth Trading Co.), grabbed my Remington 22, fumbled in a clip, and marched out to the wide front porch, every inch the stalwart defender of life, wife and property.

I stood there shaking a little (from the cold), and peered around. They were still out there, yelling and howling and trading insults. To the left about 40 yards away, over by the telephone pole in George’s field, one of the grey ghosts started a devilish doxology. He’d let out a rippling phrase and the others would yip and howl back from all their positions. Night spirits worshipping who knows what goblins.

The ringleader stayed put and the others seemed to be moving around, sounding for all I knew as if they were in the yard and around the barn. Angling for a good layout for an attack, maybe. Couldn’t tell how close they were but they sounded as if they were just yards away.

I could imagine them bounding up the stairs, wild black wraiths, intent on biting into my throat, taking me down. There was nothing between me and those over-sized canine teeth but my gun. I imagined them swirling around in the invisible inky dark like predatory wolves, setting up the kill. And the kill was going to be me.

I lifted the rifle, pointed it at the phone pole. I could almost see that coyote, could almost aim right at him. My finger wrapped stealthily around the trigger, ready for action.

Now this was profoundly stupid. First of all I couldn’t actually see the telephone pole, much less the animal. You never, ever shoot into the darkness, especially where you can’t even see a target. Second, even a really skilled hunter has trouble getting close enough to a coyote to shoot. Third, pointing that gun was plain pointless. It was just a primeval defensive motion, a gesture.

They weren’t about to attack me. In fact they could have cared less.

I was later told that those coyotes were just out having a good time. Tom Elliot, now a state wildlife biologist, spent seven years as a full-time coyote hunter in a neighboring county. “Fact is, I lived closer to them than my own family” he told me, then chuckled softly, “which is why I don’t hunt them any more.” I detected a bit of wistfulness in the comment. It’s a funny thing about real hunters and their attitude towards game. There is a deep respect, almost a kind of love, between the hunter and the prey.

He went on, “Let me tell you one thing about those sounds you heard. If you could hear them, they were letting you hear them. They live all around you, but you’ll never know it unless they are just out socializing. They don’t howl when they’re hunting.”

Oh. We’d eavesdroppped on a coyote social event.

This information left me feeling pretty silly, flat and unsatisfied. I also felt ticked off that they partied through our pleasant sleep and across our property, got our dogs riled and no doubt had the chickens terrified. I decided to look further into coyotes.

Coyotes don’t attack humans. According to Eastern Coyote Research, there has only been one coyote-caused fatality in all the recorded history of North America. In contrast, there are 4.7 million dog bites each year in the US, with over 1,000 people a day going to emergency rooms, leading to 15-20 deaths a year. You can tell this info came from a coyote advocate site.

Coyotes do eat cats and dogs. Pets aren’t their normal food, but they’ll have a beagle for lunch if one comes into range and they’re hungry. Normally nocturnal hunters, coyotes rarely come out in the daytime (except in suburban areas but that’s another place and story).

But at the time, I didn’t know all this. Out there on the porch, gripping that gun, I stood guard until the marauders had moved on down the way, across Raymond’s fields and away into the dark blue night and silence. Then I went back to bed.

Three weeks later it happened again. Nancy was petrified. Once again I went out, this time freshly informed, more out of curiosity than fear. That night I just listened. Them there wily coyotes seemed to be moving down the hill, as if on patrol through part of their range.

Considering the fact that Nancy threatens to leave the house each time she hears those scary howls, and the 10 chickens, 3 cats and 2 dogs we have living here on the edge of the forest, it was time to Do Something. I called Darrin.

Darrin and I conferred, and conceived a Plan. In the first stage, he’d come up very early one morning with a special calling device and a buddy who like him is an experienced hunter and a crack shot. They’d set up the calling device and take up positions, “up there on the hill, upwind,” explained our intrepid hunt director, “Coyotes always circle around downwind so they can come up on their prey undetected.”

The FoxPro caller is pretty high tech. It’s got a powerful speaker and hundreds of pre-recorded animal cries, howls, yips, barks, chirps, gobbles, cheeps, rustlings, moans, and other animal intonations. Pick the animal, pick the attractive tones of the female in heat or the probing sounds of the intruding male, press the button, and “they come a-runnin’, or they’re s’posed to, anyways,” as Darrin put it. It’s controlled by radio so the hunters can be well away, out of olfactory range. “It even has a furry tail that flips around and looks like a coyote tail,” said Darrin.

They were to arrive pre-dawn, set up and see if they could call in a male in the barely visible morning light. The idea was to kill the male, the purpose of which to remove a key player and warn off the others.

Did I say kill? As in kill the poor coyote? Yes, I did. I emphatically do not want to have my chickens, cats or especially my dogs killed for a coyote luncheon. It is clearly not possible to sit down and talk reason with these hunters. I figure that if they won’t leave we will evict them by any means necessary, the sooner the better. It’s us agin’ them.

Darrin, not one to cause unnecessary cruelty to the wild animals he works with daily, concurs. He won’t use foot traps, but he will shoot coyotes and he’ll use snares. He’s had success with both.

Dawn came early and went. No sign of Darrin, no yips or yells, no shots. No hits, no runs, no score. He and buddy were out there alright but nothing worked. No coyotes came. Contacted later, he ruefully reported only one result, “We did call in a fox, though.” Typical result when coyote hunting in field and woods. Just too many hiding places and the opponent is too wily. “Those damn foxes really get in the way,” he said disgustedly.

A few weeks later, we heard the coyote chorus again, and again Darrin responded. Phase Two. This time, he’d come up alone, at night. He’d go away’s up in George’s cornfield, up near the treeline, set up the caller, move upwind and try again. I quickly spotted the obvious flaw. It was in the waning moon phase and there would be no moonlight. Feeling pretty savvy, like a real country boy, I rather cockily asked, “OK, but how are you going to see? It’s pitch black out there this time of the month!”

“Red light beam,” grinned the ever savvy Darrin. “Coyotes can’t see in the red spectrum. I point my red light, spot the animal, then flip on my high power hunting light and shoot before they can react.”

He showed me his rifle. Looking vaguely like a lightweight field version of something the Terminator would carry, this was a business-like gun with camouflage patterns covering the stock and barrel, a long sighting scope, another tube for the red beam emitter, and a squat, compact halogen light for lighting up the target. With optics, reticles, batteries, sighting adjustments, light sources, and various tubes and stealth graphics, this was a far cry from Daniel Boone’s musket.

On the evening of the appointed day, we shut the chickens in their coop, blockaded the cats in the barn and got the dogs in. Had some dinners, I guess. I forget. Long about 9 PM we went out onto the porch. Just to get some air. Of course I was curious to know if we could hear the caller, or hear any shots, etc. Nothing much happened.

Then we sensed more than saw a little flash of red light, a long ways away, high up on the hill over in George’s cornfield. Then silence.

Then a faint yip. And again. Then silence. Hunting involves a lot of silence, I guess. There was a fair amount of it that evening.

We sat there, breath not exactly bated but feeling like vicarious partners on the hunt.

A Yip! “I bet that’s one of them, come to investigate!” I whispered excitedly. “Hope so,” muttered Nancy, shivering a bit. More flashes of red. Darrin moving his red light around. I could just imagine him getting one of the critters in sight. We didn’t move a muscle.

All of a sudden the sky exploded into brilliant flashes of light. It was like the Fourth of July on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C. Skyrockets, flares, exploding shells. Cascades of straw-colored streamers in the sky. Crimson explosions and magenta dots of light floating down. Kaboom!

We looked at each other, dumbfound. “What the hell is that!” we said, almost simultaneously. It wasn’t Darrin, that’s for sure.

About 20 degrees off to the right, over the far ridge and down the valley, someone was lighting off tons of fireworks. Right in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason. We could see flares of colored light edging the outline of the ridge then from behind would stream up a rocket and then we’d see another massive explosion. These were serious fireworks! Not like you buy in a box for the 4th. Professional grade. Huge.

It went on for a long time. Boom! Boom! Flashes and flares. Had to admit it was a pretty nice display but our enjoyment was marred both by the inexplicability of it, and concern for Darrin, up there in the dark.

I could just imagine poor Darrin high on the hill, cold and hunkered down, stealthily having set up his caller and hidden in the bushes, now gnashing his teeth as the coyotes ran miles away. I felt for him, just imagining his frustration and fury at having the hunt spoiled by this extremely odd, bizarrely untimely aerial display.

About 15 minutes after it was over, we heard a knock on the door. Darrin, come to report.

I asked him, with a hint of mano-a-mano compassion in my voice if he wasn’t ticked off about the fireworks, and wasn’t it really WEIRD?

He just looked at me.

I looked back. “The fireworks,” I said, “wasn’t that strange? I bet it drove all the coyotes into the next county.”

He gazed back at me, with an odd tilt to his head, as if thinking, what are you talking about, and said, “What fireworks?”

Dumbfounded for the second time that night, I bugged my eyes out, and then realized he was serious. I explained what we’d seen. Told him about the way the sky was lit up for miles around. The sounds of exploding fireworks and the far-away whistle of rockets going up. The cascades of brilliant showering colors filling the night sky.

He shook his head slowly with that down-gazing attitude that out here indicates deep commiseration about the many unsolvable mysteries of life. Then he glanced up and said, “Never saw ëem. Never heard a thing!”

It was my turn to stare. A mystery indeed. My mind rocketed around trying to resolve it – but he was closer, he couldn’t possibly have missed – but the noise – how could he not... Then I realized I’d never solve this one.

I let it go, gathered up and asked the obvious question, “How’d you do?”

He gazed out, gathering his memories of the night and said, “No coyotes. But I did call in a couple of foxes, a little red fox and bigger grey. Those damn foxes. Always getting in the way.”

And with that he grinned, picked up his rifle, and drove away home.

We never did find out what those fireworks were all about. Nobody else we asked knew anything, either.

Back After a Busy Summer

It’s the chickens again.

Actually, it’s the winter coming again. After an extremely busy summer and fall, it's time to record the many thoughts and feelings which have passed, and which are present now. First among them: cold weather approaches.

Everything changes when the weather gets cold. Elementals like water, equipment, clothing, materials, and yes, chicken care all shift when the weather gets cold. When I lived in the city, the only significant change that winter imposed on me was having to wear a jacket and sometimes footgear that could get wet.

In the city and suburb we go from weatherproof, heated spaces to other similarly shielded spaces in mobile weather-protected capsules that are equally well heated. We are so well insulated from the elements that we come to ignore forces of nature. For most of us devastating fire or flood is something we experience as images on television.

In our overly insulated lives we have lost touch with basics of life that have driven culture and inventions for centuries. We forget (or worse, never learn) that cold can be dangerous, uncomfortable and terribly inconvenient. Not here.

It’s time to cut or buy firewood. The old-timers know what’s coming so they cut firewood in the summer and stack it so it’s dry and easy to burn when it’s needed. New-timers like us, until we learned, figure that like going to the supermarket where you can get anything at any time, firewood is equally easy to come by, so we never prepared. This error can be costly in several ways, not just monetary.

Observing the way people here dance with the seasons is a lesson in fables. Or perhaps schoolhouse fables come to life when you live close to nature, as we do here in an old stone house that’s been through more than 200 winters. There’s ancient wisdom here to be understood.

Fables were developed to convey wisdom and life knowhow from one generation to another. The format was one in which no one was preaching down to another but the point got across, at least to those who were listening.

As our unusually warm fall suddenly reverts to normal frigidity, a fable that comes to mind would be that of the grasshopper who didn’t prepare for the winter, and had to be saved by the wiser ants who set aside food.

Same thing here. If you didn’t think ahead, and now need firewood as the cold winds blow, you’ll pay a price for it. High BTU wood like oak or elm goes for a premium as cold weather approaches. And well-dried wood is even more expensive, if you can find it. The newbies compete for a scarce supply. One person I know counts on the careless grasshoppers for much of his annual income. He does this merely by cutting green wood in Spring, and selling it as dry premium firewood in the middle of winter.

Sure, you can get wood at any time. Most of it is fresh cut. Until you’ve tried it, you can’t imagine what a hassle it is to use green wood in a fireplace. It is difficult to ignite and then when it burns it uses much of the released heat just driving off the remaining water in the rest of the log. As a result you get much less heat from the wood. Which means that you use a lot more wood for the same amount of heat gained. This is not merely a financial impact – it’s a lot more wood to handle.

Our home uses about 3 cords of dry wood in an average winter. That’s a full dumptruck full of wood, weighing 10,000 pounds or five tons. It takes a long day of repetitious bending, lifting and handling just to stack it. Then as the wood is used, it is unstacked and brought inside. which converts into many trips outside and back. It means extra deliveries when the outside grass is mushy, and the large truck leaves deep ruts in the lawn. This converts into further work in the Spring to correct. And that’s if you get dry seasoned wood. If you get green wood you’ll handle an additional 2 1/2 tons. Twice – once when stacking and again when you move it inside. Once you’ve gone through this, it makes you think ahead the second year,

If you have a few old trees and a chain saw, you can get fuel for free. If you cut it early and let it dry, you have much less wood to stack , much more efficient heat, and fewer trips outside to reload the fireplace.

Before living here, I doubt if I would have believed that firewood would involved so much forethought and planning.

Coping with winter heating is a complex subject out here. When your house is surrounded with frigid cold, you want a reliable, cheap solution. Emphasis on reliable. Emphasis in many cases, on cheap.

A big fad here at the moment is the corn furnace, which burns dried corn kernels. Feed corn is in abundance here, which makes for a cheap solution. Other people have outdoor wood-burning furnaces, clean gas fired heating, oil furnaces, LPG heaters, a whole range of technologies.

In all cases, it’s about coping with cold.

People here are in most cases of modest means, in some cases quite wealthy, and in surprisingly many cases, prosperous and comfortable. There isn’t much poverty here, but there is very little exposed wealth, either.

The culture is modest, interconnective, and almost always genial. There are many vectors that form the cultural matrix here, but at least one strong component comes from a shared experience of past hardships and a resulting attitude of tolerance:

Everyone got cold in the old days, and a lot of people still get cold.

Cold is, when you face it for real, frightening on a profoundly primeval level. This fear goes basic very fast. Just walking outside in a still, very cold night when you know there is no help for miles around, and coyotes are on the prowl, is enough to force shivers and fears into your deepest being.

To go from that feeling of exposure and fear, into a warm house, smelling rich aromas of good food, seeing the welcoming flames of a well-stoked fire, and being welcomed by strong dogs who express every feeling from unreserved love to total fearlessness is to know an equally primeval and deep sense of protection from cold.

Such experience is available to very few people these days, which is a shame. To know such feelings is to be in touch with earth, nature, life and reality in ways that are richly intense and connected to elemental sources of our instincts.

Cold affects ordinary things, which imposes pre-emptive activity. Like water-based paint. It’s no good if it freezes, so if you want to preserve your touch-up paint, you bring it in. Elmer’s glue goes bad if frozen, and if you don’t have that magical stuff for a minor repair, it’s a 22 mile round trip to get some new. Expensive power packs for power tools go dead. Letting a drill battery freeze is an expensive mistake – my Panasonic drill battery pack retails for $96. Ruined if frozen, fine if kept inside.

Or more important, water lines. One of the rituals of on-coming cold weather here is the draining and purging of water lines. You have not lived until you have walked into a basement full of waist-high freezing water in the middle of the night to shut off the water going into a busted pipe, as I once had to do. Such experiences teach the wisdom of not being a grasshopper.

We’re not yet at the point of purging the water lines that reach out to the barn and garden, but the decision will have to be made soon. It’s a royal disaster if one of the lines going through the barn and out to the chicken coop (them again!) or to the garden bursts. However, after the water is shut off, it becomes a royal pain in the ass to have to hand-carry water from the house to the chicken coop in cold weather. So we delay and hope to not be caught by a pipe-breaker freeze. In the depths of really cold weather, we often think about getting rid of “them damn chickens. “

The bright and wise observer, perhaps not used to caring for chickens in winter will ask, why not simply use a heater for the chicken’s water? This is an astute observation, and the flaw could only be known if you realize that chickens must have water at all times. Even with a heater, you still have to replenish the supply and without the convenient outlet next to the coop, life becomes charmingly ancient and zen-like, as in, chop wood, carry water. Only in our case, it’s stack wood, carry water.

A cynic might ask, why not just get rid of the pesky poultry and buy eggs at the grocery store? Indeed.

Ah. Well, this goes to the heart question of whether a rural life is worthwhile. Such an investigation it touches many important values about life. We really enjoy feeding and caring for these pea-brained idiots. It’s also a prime part of the fabric of our life, to wake up and hear the roosters crowing, or to see the chicken antics as they dig for worms or fluff wings, or in the case of the cocks, posture and crow.

If we got rid of the chickens, they would be eaten. Not that I’m really against eating chickens but when it comes to our chickens it’s a different thing. In the end, if I have to get rid of one of our chickens, I want to be the ender. Which means, ulp, learning how to kill, bleed, eviscerate, de-feather, dress, and butcher a chicken.

I can avoid this difficulty by saying (truthfully) more importantly, it’s about the eggs.

Once, at a Denny’s restaurant in Emeryville, CA., I had a egg and bacon breakfast which made me swear off eggs for two years. The eggs had so many hormones I could taste them. It was an off-putting, slightly frightening chemical oral assault. I felt betrayed and conceivably endangered by the assembly-line hidden egg production source that produced eggs with such an overlay of synthetic chemistry.

Here, our chickens give us wholesome, clean and richly flavored eggs, free of any off tastes. They taste great and make wonderful ingredients in all kinds of delicious foods, from simple fried eggs to complex desserts. You can see the difference if you fry one our eggs next to a store-bought egg. One is pale, pallid, soft and without much substance, the other is richly yellow, firm and full of life and color.


As I said, it’s the chickens again.

With the change in season, we have to prepare them for the coming cold. That means setting up the water heater, adding much more straw to the bedding, shutting off vents that could bring in cold air to their tiny bodies, and …

Adding light.

Despite the unusual warmth of this season, one thing didn’t change: the progression of dawn and dusk times. Unless we think mankind’s arrogance in ignoring global warming extends to denial of the orbit of the planet itself, it’s necessary to see that the sun rises and sets at different times as winter approaches.

And now we come to the wisdom of chickens. If you were a chicken, wouldn’t you want to make it so that your eggs hatched in warm times, so they could grow up with the best possible chance of becoming handsome roosters or winsome hens by the time winter arrived?

You win the chicken survival quiz. I won’t try to stretch your imagination further into how a chicken thinks, if in fact they do. Suffice it to say that as the season gets closer to winter, the amount of daylight shortens, and egg production drops off correspondingly to a dead halt.

In the combined and incredibly massive lore of chicken husbandry, someone cottoned to the link between light and egg production, and a great truth was learned: a hen’s egg-production system is governed by the amount of light in a day. She will lay more or fewer eggs depending on the way light levels seem to indicate the season.

From which we gain an important egg production maxim: if you want more eggs in winter, increase the hours of daylight! How? Put a light in the coop and time it so that the chickens get at least 15 hours of light a day.

It’s rather amazing how effective this is. By programming the light in the coop to go on from 3AM to 8 AM, egg production goes from a chancy 2-3 a week to 8 a day!

It’s the chickens again.



And a whole lot more…

The Chicken Haircuts

(This story was part of an email to my sister, in mid-Spring of 2006)

Now seems like a good time for a little poultry update:

The chickens got haircuts a few days ago. This will be explained in a moment but first I have to get something off my chest. It's nearly incomprehensible how dumb chickens are. On the intelligence scale, they seem to lie somewhere between a less-evolved plant and a worm, except that worms can learn to avoid dangerous areas.

Over the last few weeks, Daisy has exercised her svelte and youthful body by responding to eons-deep instincts to great advantage by chasing down chickens. These would be the ones who flew out of their carefully fenced in paddock area, which is to say five of them. The other two, now husband and wife, have been cooped up in a private hotel recently built by me. This sequestration was the solution to incessant chicken fights, engendered understandably and predictably enough by there being six roosters and one hen on the premises.

(Above: the six suitors and the hen of their dreams in happier days)

Or so we thought. Chickens had been squawking and flying out of the paddock at all hours and we thought it was due to male competition. After picking a suitor for the lady and putting them in the coop, we thought the loser boys would just settle down and peck in peace.

Not so. They continued to explore the joys of flight, and spent most of their time outside the safety of the paddock. Daisy's first success resulted in a chicken who sat frozen as she started to eat into it's back. I had to kill that one immediately out of mercy using a handy rock to the head method. Not elegant. Next she got a gay blade who again ventured out of safety and got cornered trying to walk through chicken wire. He was dispatched by yours truly who "seized" the opportunity to practice the "twirl-em by the neck" method of killing a chicken, as related to me by Mom, recalling her grandmother's technique.

We became better at knowing when a chicken was caught, by the sounds they make (a kind of contented-sounding chuckle), and were so able to get to the next bird as he lay between the paws of the slavering beast.

The next time that happened, I was able to pick up the distraught fowl, by this time with wet feathers all awry, and toss it over the fence into safety. I mentioned to Nancy that surely this ought to imprint positively on the chicken - having been literally saved from the jaws of death by a benefactor who thrust it to safety one would think that the chicken would never, ever go outside the safety zone again. But within hours three of them were strutting about on the grass outside, chortling and clucking happily as Daisy slunk again forth upon them.

After enduring sudden, alarming feminine hysteria ("Eric, come quick - she's got another one!") several times one morning as I attempted to clean the barn, I thought hard. Ransacked the mental library for ideas and finally had the brainstorm. Clip their wing feathers! That way, they can't fly out of the paddock! I proposed this to Nancy, who promptly and complacently said, "Oh, I know about that one. It's in my chicken book!"

The answer to my question, "WHY didn't you mention it before?" brought forth no satisfactory reply, and I began to think that the chickens were not the only ones having difficulty applying knowledge to life circumstances.

Nonetheless, Nancy and I went out early in the next morning and started catching chickens. This episode will make an entertaining tale by itself, so I''ll leave it to your imagination. Despite much effort and ingenuity, we had little success. My chicken catcher, a bit of wire attached to a long pole was fashioned after an antique model I'd seen in Raymond's garage, failed to function in any sense of the word. Suddenly in a brainstorm no doubt stimulated by the genius of my ancestors, I lit upon the obvious answer: use the dog. Who else is better at chasing down chickens than her?

Working as a 3 person team, we soon rounded up most of the miscreants (except for the ones looking on, eleven feet up in the branches of a young walnut tree). I grasped each one by the legs and held it upside down as Nancy gingerly stretched out each wing. Following the line of tiny inside feathers, I cut off their large wing feathers, making a pile of white detritus on the ground that any casual observer would interpret as the site of a major killing frenzy.

How we got the high-flying burrito brothers is the subject of yet another story. Suffice it to say that after 3 breathless hours of chase and drama we got them all clipped and contained. You have no IDEA how hysterical a chicken can get if it thinks you are trying to save it's neck, whereas it will lie down and let itself get eaten alive by a dog.

I keep thinking there is a life lesson in this but cannot quite grasp what it might be. However, the chickens have been safe inside the paddock and enjoying their daily struts, and Daisy has gone on to advanced hunting adventures, such as trying to catch rabbits.

All I Wanted Was Toast...

I am making bread at the moment. Trying to, anyway. This started because I belatedly noticed this AM that the normal butter-tinged and browned crusty component, i.e. toast, was sadly missing from my otherwise fine breakfast of still warm eggs from the coop and nicely browned potatoes with bits of fresh tarragon. The balance was off.

Fortunately Nancy was out of town to attend a conference, so the suffering was confined to only one person. Unfortunately, that person was me. I thought of delaying the proceedings until Some Bread could be made, but thought better of it. Base hunger and a thrifty desire not to waste the succulent taters and eggs forced me to eat immediately. But as they say, there is always tomorrow. And on that inevitably upcoming morn, some dern tasty toast would be lovely.

Motivated after downing my otherwise delicious but breadless breakfast, I mixed up a nice dough, added the granular yeast and a bit of salt, and some savory marjoram to make a nice herbal loaf. I attentively worked the KitchenAid to make the dough satiny and full of gluten. I even warmed a small crock for the little yeast cells to grow in cozily with warmth and moisture. I came back several hours later to check progress, expecting to find a satisfyingly expanded mass of yeasty, glossy dough ready for firing.

Nuthin! The dough was supple and satiny as it should be but had not grown a bit. It was like flaccid pizza dough with flecks of herbs. It felt good to the touch but also seemed to lack that live quality that characterizes good bread dough.

Clearly the yeast had not activated. Could the yeast be dead? One of the intricacies of bread-making is to calculate the amount of salt to put in the dough. Too much and the yeast dies. Too little and the resulting bread tastes flat. Dreading the result, I tasted the dough, expecting to find a salty mess. Nope. It seemed nicely doughy but not too salty. Hrrrm...

In the old days, bakers would "proof" the yeast to make sure it was working before committing it to their hard-worked dough. But nowadays, with industrial quality controls, impervious packaging, safe storage methods etc., we don't bother with that step. We count on our yeast to be lively and ready to kick ass right out of the gate. But perhaps this yeast in some way had seen the end of it's productive days. Heat and light can kill yeast cells. Maybe mine had a case of sunburn.

To test this theory, I put a little warm water in a glass, sprinkled some of the brownish grains into a glass of warm water, and added honey as a culinary incentive to the little cells. Normally, the organic sugars and nutrients in honey are like the feast of Valhalla to the tiny but voracious and vigorous vikings of yeast. Modern quick yeast is quick to imbibe sugars, resulting in rapid multiplication of the colony and plenty of carbon dioxide bubbles as the useful waste product. But this stuff merely sat in the bottom of the glass in a glum mass. Well, I thought, maybe this is tired yeast and just needs a bit of a kick start. It certainly had all the incentives for a vigorous comeback. I checked back 10 minutes later, expecting to see a fine crop of bubbles. Nuthin'.

Puzzled, I concluded that the yeast was dead, and got out the vacuum pak of Red Star Yeast I've been saving in the refrigerator against just such an emergency. Bypassing the lackluster yeast, I thought I’d just mix in some fresh troops and save the loaf. But something wasn’t right.

Still flummoxed, I pondered the jar containing those granular particles that had so totally failed to rise or make bubbles even when encouraged. It seemed a shame to waste all that dead yeast, so I began to sprinkle it onto the scraps of potato peelings and vegetable scraps being saved for the chickens. A little waft of smell came into the nostrils. A mellow, sweetish smell. I tentatively tipped a wet finger into the stuff and tasted. Sweet!

Oh for crying out loud. This was not yeast. It was that granular and weird form of brown sugar designed not to clump up. Ye gods. No wonder it didn't rise. It couldn't. It was fuel for yeast, not the magic substance itself. But it looks EXACTLY like dry yeast.

I'd like to say that I laughed at myself indulgently for this error but that isn't true. I was in fact chagrined, ticked off and feeling quite stupid. These sentiments gave rise to some philosophizing about how all true learning is accompanied by failure and pain. At the moment, the failure and pain part was apparent, but not the learning part. Feeling a bit mystified and blue, I made myself a little compensatory beverage which involved ice cubes. One cube made it off the countertop and into the wild blue yonder.

Having just cleaned up the entire kitchen, I got out the flour and mixer and set out to incorporate the trusty Red Star yeast into the perfectly satiny but flat dough. Bakers revere that satin look and I knew that adding water would make the dough sticky and yucky. And I was fairly certain that a faint coating of flour would appear on all the newly cleaned surfaces as a result. But there was no recourse. I added warm water, flour to absorb it, and new yeast.

Nicely, after some KitchenAid whirrings and a bit of hand-kneading, the new dough was ready for re-rising. It was even satiny! I lifted my glass and savored a bit of conquest, hoping that a sturdy well-risen loaf would soon be ready for baking.

Around the corner came the Rocket Dog, yelping and pirouetting. In her mouth was the errant ice cube. She dropped it provocatively in front of me, then as I turned to meet the challenge, she picked it up and raced away. Obligingly I gave chase. We went around the living room and over the sofa in a series of circles and dodges. It was no contest, as usual. She has four legs to my two.

It's great fun to give chase to my diminutive canine companion, but it’s always a bit sobering. She weighs 11 pounds and is in top form, from having chased rabbits and squirrels all winter. I weigh over 230, and can only lumber about. The contrast is embarrassing. Needless to say, I never indulge her when anyone else is about, save my ever-tolerant wife and a few very good friends. The Rocket Dog got under the table, where I cannot go without suffering bruised knees, and demurely dared me to go after her. I was tempted to attempt a trump of her feminine wiles, but I am wise to her tactics and walked away. Brains over brawn, I thought fuzzily, in a bit of a metaphorical mashup. Put simply, this didn’t work.

Eventually, she found a place of attack. The ice cube ended up in a corner and with much growling and precise stalking technique, she re-captured the ice cube. It was by this time much diminished, and Dog conquered all with a lick and a chomp.

She went to sleep, I did things on my computer. As you have surely intuited, time passed. I checked: the dough had risen! (rose?)

Optimistically, I set the oven to 500 degrees. Now for the final forming of the dough.

In the forests of France many years ago, peasants found a nice way to contain rising dough. They took reeds and formed them into round baskets, into which to place dough to rise. When the dough was ready, they would invert the baskets, plopping the dough onto flat wooden shovels (called, oddly enough, peels) and slide them into the community oven to bake. This method makes intriguingly spiraled patterns on the surface of the bread, and is an honorable and classic method.

I have one of those reed baskets. I thought it would be craftsmanlike and attractive to make my own intriguingly spiraled bread. However, no one had told me how to keep the dough from sticking to the basket when you try to "plop' it over onto the peel.

As you no doubt infer, I've had many difficulties with perfectly risen dough that totally collapses when trying to pry sticky dough out of that infernal basket. I've studied "The Bread Baker's Apprentice," by Peter Reinhart, and other expert sources for a solution to this problem,to no satisfactory conclusion. In the end, I just load up the basket with flour and hope for the best.

Thankfully, this time it worked. Plopped the dough over onto the peel. No problem! Nice spirals of flour on the surface. Slid the dough into the oven and onto the stone. I say “stone” as if I have a purpose-built wood-fired stone floored hearth oven a la Poilane, but it’s really just a very large square ceramic flooring tile I got from a discount building supply warehouse for $3.95. But it works pretty well, especially if the oven is heated up for 30 minutes prior to baking.

Threw some water into the oven to make steam. This is a great trick: the steam makes the crust crisp and toasty.

Time again passed. Nothing with bread is fast. Eventually, the oven began exuding a delicious yeasty and slightly acrid aroma, an olfactory signal that I’ve learned means that the bread is becoming ready.

Rocket Dog jumped into my lap for a bit of connection and love. While she licked my face caringly, I asked myself the eternal question. No, not one of those why are we here in the universe questions, but the bread baker's question: Is the loaf done?

In Reinhart's charming description of the boulangerie of Lionel Poilane, arguably the best bread baker in Paris and thus the world, we learn that their bakers use only wood-fired ovens, and determine the correct baking temperature by tossing bits of parchment into the hot oven, and counting the seconds until the paper explodes into flame. Given the correct temperature, it is only a matter of a given number of minutes to baking perfection.

Lacking parchment and the correct second-count, I had no idea how long to bake the loaf. It smelled great, but I’ve been fooled before into taking out the loaf before it’s time, only to end up with a soggy mid-section. There's only one way to really know if the loaf is done: take it's temperature. It should be at least 205.

After throwing out 3 cheap digital thermometers after each one unexpectedly ceased working properly, I asked Santa for a professional temperature gauge. Santa answered and now I own a marvelously accurate and sturdy tool, lab-tested and guaranteed accurate from -58 to +572 degrees. I inserted the probe into the loaf and watched the little digits race upwards until they steadied and stopped. Ah! 205 degrees internal. Perfect.

Moving from modern technology to that of ancient peoples, I used the wooden peel to bring the loaf out of the oven and reverently placed it on a rack to cool. It smelled wonderful, and looked even better. When I say, “reverently,” it's not an abuse of the word. Breadmaking is a mystical art, and when one gets it to work well, it's a somewhat religious experience. Just try it without using a bread-making machine or a loaf pan, and you’ll see what I mean.

Now then. Here we are. The Rocket Dog is asleep, there's some nice stew in the crock pot. The aroma of just-baked bread fills the kitchen. A bit of stew, a break of bread and a glass of wine will make a satisfying little dinner.

















As Emeril LaGasse often says on his cooking show, I wish you had Smell-o-Vision. This loaf with it's "intriguingly spiraled pattern" is alive with rich aromas of herbs and wheat. If you could only smell it! Alas, a picture will have to do.

Bad Weather and Scavengers

(note: the following was written several months ago as autumn was fading)

FARMING IS AN INCESSANT GAMBLE with the weather. Recent weather reports have been forecasting a lot of rain on the way, and we've had many wet days of overcast, with a few glorious, revitalizing sunny charmers thrown in.

To me, this variety is interesting, even beautiful. But for other people around here, the coming rain can spell difficulty, if not disaster. As in many things, timing is everything. Trying to get a harvest in quickly can scatter leavings that attract pestilential scavengers. Like grackles.

Yesterday in the blustery cold wind, Dan the farmer who works our neighbor farmer's land, harvested his feed corn in the field next to ours. He worked all day, driving his old red tractor and equipment steadily up and down across the swath of dried corn. And he worked well into the inky blue night, harvesting by headlight.

Dan had left the corn out for a long time, trying to get it dry enough so it won't spoil in storage. He uses this corn to feed his beef cattle during the winter. With rain coming he had to scurry to get as much in as he could. He didn't get it all. The field next to ours, out by the farm road, is still full of thousands of whiskery tan stalks, each with 6 or so cobs, each cob with 800 kernels dried hard and saffron yellow.

It was a lot of work to grow that corn. I've often seen Dan tending those fields. He drives his tractor, bareheaded and shirtless, white hair flowing in the wind as he turns in his seat to watch his machines. He's five years younger than me, but looks ten years older. Like most people raised on the land, he presents a genial, cheerful visage, his face crinkled into a friendly snaggle-toothed grin as he imparts savvy and sometimes inscrutable points of wisdom or opinion. But I've also seen him distracted and anxious, impatient with the questions of a greenhorn neighbor. His concerns are not minor.

Dan uses very old equipment, all he can afford. His combine, used for harvesting wheat, cost all of $3,000 and was built in the mid-40's. It uses a fortune in gas but he can repair it himself. It's a nightmare of exposed wheels and belts. His corn harvesting gear takes up the corn cobs and chews up the stalks for silage. But it leaves quite a bit of waste on the ground.

Corn kernels left in the field.

Five and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie...

Had I a shotgun, and a yen for grackle pie, I would have scored a lifetime supply today.

By dawn after Dale's harvest, there were scores of grackles sitting in the trees and on the fields, picking everything clean. By this afternoon, it was like the days of carrier pigeons - the tree down by the bottom of our land was full of them and they rose like a black cloud off the cornfields.

The sheer chittering racket of them a hundred yards away made the 17 year cicada infestation of two years ago seem like soothing background humming. It was loud and evilly weird enough to scare Daisy. The chickens not unwisely (if I can use the word with respect to the judgment of chickens) stayed huddled inside their coop.

In the late afternoon the grackles were all over our place, sitting and fluttering in the walnuts and forest trees, more than anyone could count, like black stars in the grey sky. I walked out and flushed the whole crowd. Stood in the grass up by the barn shooting with my camera upwards as they swarmed from trees up in the forest overhead, in an incessant flow lasting more than 40 minutes, thousands and thousands of them.

I ran out into the neighbor's field hoping to catch the incredible vision of them flying through the skies and over the fields. They would rise and swirl, settle then rise again like a bizarre animated swirl of soot particles over the simple scene. It began to rain but I stayed out, shooting in all directions like a maniac. But the light and my excitement worked against me and most shots didn't work. Too dark, out of focus, everything wrong. but perhaps one of over 150 images will turn out.

I went through the fence that divides our land from next door, stalking the black avian mass pecking corn on the ground, hoping to flush them in a rise over the land. They rose reluctantly from their gorging, a grumpy fluttering mass lying, a malevolent low cloud over the land until I retreated.



---------------

They have disappeared. All of them. It's evening now, almost dark. A flash of light low on the horizon to the East forsages a thunderstorm and the land is quiet. Not a bird in sight.

Where did the grackles go? Where did they come from?

Not all the corn is in and the rain is coming. I fear that the standing corn, and the months of work required to plant, protect and harvest feed corn will be wasted in hours by the rain. But Dan's a very tough, determined man and has been farming since he was 11. He's got more than a few tricks up his sleeve.

No farmer, I feel blessed and grateful to be warm and secure after this day, and not worried about feeding my livestock.

Suddenly, it's Skunks

They seem to be everywhere all of a sudden. Skunks are not often spotted in day light unless they're sick or wounded, so their increased presence is evidenced mostly by the ones that didn't make it. One ended up as roadkill on Route 75, and I spotted another casualty on the lane that connects us to that road. There was another one on the road near our mailbox a few days ago. This always makes me feel a little sad. Skunks are truly beautiful animals.

Darrin came over a few days ago to check on the flying squirrel traps. He'd set them to catch the little invaders that occupy a narrow space between the first and second floors, which is another story all it's own. In the back of his truck was a cute and very alive little skunk he'd caught for a customer who badly wanted the li'l darlin' out of her basement, and fast.

Here's Darrin getting ready to pull the towel off the trap. In his hip pocket is a tool I crave - a foam gun that lets you use only the amount of rigid expanding foam you need, and doesn't let it set in the barrel. I go through a lot of cans of foam, trying to plug leaks and block critter routes.

I wondered why we seem to be seeing skunks everywhere. “The deep freeze is over now, so they're coming out to feed and breed,” he related.

To show me the skunk, he carefully, gently, peeled the towel away from the trap. Crouching inside, the small animal was still, quiet as a mouse, seemingly almost asleep. She seemed kind of resigned and glum. I'd feel that way too, surrounded by a bars like a prison. But better days lay ahead for her.

Noticing with a sudden jab of alarm that the business end of the skunk was aimed at me, I quickly but smoothly moved to Darrin's side of the truck. He grinned, as if to say, "Now you're getting smart!" He explained that a skunk will usually give plenty of warning before it sprays. “He'll stamp his feet, turn around, try to escape. Spraying is almost a last resort for the skunk. Most people don't know that,” he explains.

Skunks supposedly make make good pets, if they are de-scented, and I asked if he thought that was true. A smile came over his face, and he said, “I'd love to have a skunk as a pet. They're gentle and affectionate, especially if you get 'em young and can hand-rear them. But I don't know of any vet who will de-scent them. I can sure find the skunks, though. If you ever learn of a vet who can do it, let me know!”

What if your dog gets a good dose of skunk? "Wash him real good, and call me," advises Darrin. " I've got a commercial grade ionizing air cleaner that works wonders. You just put the dog in the same room as the air cleaner and wait a few hours. You'll notice an amazing difference. And by the way, tomato paste doesn't work. It just makes your dog gummy and smelling like tomatoes in addition to skunk."

Darrin knows the habits of all kinds of animals. Bats, among other things. He's an expert at ridding belfries, attics and other places of bats.

He's also a son of the land, and has many skills of observation, experience and insight. Such as where to find morels by the hundreds, or wild leeks, and wild raspberries and blueberries. I'm hoping he'll let me tag along for mushroom hunting or berry picking some day. Especially after his story about seeing a black bear in the berry patch he'd just finished foraging in.

After we discussed the flying squirrels, he left down the dirt road, only to come barreling back up in reverse to announce that there was a skunk down in the lower field, and did I want him to shoot it?

Darrin is a gentle man, who despite his work as an animal control specialist truly loves living creatures and does not harm them if it can be avoided. But, as he pointed out, skunks can also carry rabies and this one was walking a bit wobbly. This skunk was in the hunting range of the Rocket Dog, so we decided with a bit of regret that the skunk's time was up. He went back down the road and I put R. Dog in the house.

I heard a series of pops and then he came walking back across the field to his truck. “Yeah, I got 'im,” he said with a touch of regret. “I think he was sick though, so it's probably just as well. Sick animals don't last long out here and can spread disease.” He put away his large silvery pistol.

A lot of guys carry pistols around here, 22's mostly. It's not a macho thing or for “protection.” You don't see men flashing guns around or walking around with surreptitious bulges. It's just part of how one lives here. For example, my neighbor shot a copperhead with his pistol a couple of years ago, while riding on his tractor.

We chatted a bit more, then he took off to find a place to release the little skunk.

This one will make it.

The Cardinal

It snowed yesterday. Outside in the apple tree, a cardinal sat, taking it all in.

Inside I sat, writing this.

It's been hectic lately, so please bear with me – I'll be back with more about hats, the art of firewood cutting, and the Rocket Dog before long.

Retro Sound in the Woods

I'm enjoying this morning. It's very early and cold all around, but I'm bundled up in my "Lord of the Manor" robe and high boots, drinking cocoa and listening to the radio while writing in my blog. The fire in the background is starting to warm the room, everyone else is asleep still.

I'm using headphones to listen to a retro 50's theme station called Illinois Street Lounge on Soma-FM - the piece I'm hearing right now is Zofka - Une Derniere Fois...very fun and energetic. Soma-FM is "extremely independent" listener-supported radio from San Francisco. They have 11 channels, each odd and interesting.


I love being able to tune in the world while enjoying the remoteness and quiet of the forest and fields around the house.

New Light Paintings

The quietness of the old stone house is peaceful and conducive to creativity, or so I find. An example is a new exhibition of light paintings called Pinturas de la Luz: Morro Group. These images were made by using long exposures, which allowed light to trace across the screen, composing spatial volumes and energy. Although there is some control through the motion of the camera during exposure and the length of the exposure, the interaction of various light sources and their respective intensities combines in ways that can't be predicted. The result is a kind of collaboration between preparation and chance, and between artist and scene.

Back to the Coop

Well, we're back. From one extreme to another.

There:


Here:




Getting back to the Farm I found the chickens in fine shape, thanks to our good neighbors Grant and Charlie who came up every three days to check the water and feed.

Rocket Dog loved the snow and pranced and cavorted in twirlings of insane joy, snuffling under the white stuff to find mice or racing from one tree to another.

I was lost in the beauty at times but was soon caught up in reality by notices like the following from the Emergency Advisory service:

THE COLDEST AIR OF THE SEASON CONTINUES TO FILTER INTO THE STATE
AND WILL STAY IN PLACE WELL INTO THE NEW WORK WEEK. THE
COMBINATION OF LOW TEMPS BETWEEN 5 & 10 ABOVE ZERO.AND
A GUSTY WIND OUT OF THE WEST WILL CAUSE WIND CHILL READINGS TO
AVERAGE 15 TO 20 DEGREES BELOW ZERO FOR A TIME LATER TONIGHT AND
EARLY MONDAY.

WHILE THE WIND CHILL READINGS WILL CREEP UP FOR A TIME LATER
MONDAY MORNING.IT WILL STILL BE VERY COLD WITH WIND CHILLS NOT
EXPECTED TO RECOVER MUCH ABOVE ZERO EVEN DURING THE AFTERNOON
HRS. THE BITTER COLD WILL CONTINUE INTO MON NIGHT & EARLY
TUESDAY WHEN AN ADVISORY MAY ONCE AGAIN BE NEEDED.

Brr…. It’s cold up here. And we’re getting low on firewood. The idea of a little hacienda on some balmy-breezed island begins to have some real appeal.