I was seven and a half months pregnant at the end of a hot and humid Virginia summer. Allow me to set the scene and be super dramatic while also being entirely accurate. It was about dusk, thunder clouds were rolling in over the mountains, casting gray shadows through the trees in the last light of day. Then disaster struck. Spencer got stung by a wasp (to be fair, he was trying to eradicate wasp nests from the side of our house using a hose and a broom, sooo…). He had called to me to bring him an ice cube, and I stood there with the sliding glass door ajar, clearly in a haze of pregnancy brain fog, completely forgetting that the chickens were out free ranging and our Huskie/Shepherd mix, Cooper, was absolutely not trained to be friends with them. In fact, he had already demonstrated once how fun he thought it was to play chase with them. Luckily, that time, they had been out in the garden and had managed to hide in the tomato trellises, where his rather large body wasn’t welcome.
But this time, off he went, dashing right past me as I stood there with the door gaping open, practically inviting him to a fancy chicken dinner. I screamed (drama, remember?) for Spencer to get him, but by the time he had tackled Cooper to the ground, Jane was already in his mouth and had been shaken a couple times. Here I should mention that Jane was my least favorite chicken. I mean, that girl was a punk. I even had friends who asked me about Jane’s latest aggravating mischief. She was mean to the other chickens, she would run away whenever we would try to catch her, she would peck at us. Basically, her personality just sucked. Until that exact moment, I had talked a lot of smack about Jane, for which I now suddenly felt overwhelmingly guilty.
When Spencer got Cooper on the ground, Jane dropped from his mouth and lay there in the grass, panting, terrified, and clearly injured. Both her legs were backwards, and there were feathers everywhere. I ran to her, too horrified and shaky to pick her up. I should mention that I have been a vegetarian for twenty years, and while I don’t ever try to push my beliefs on others (my husband loves meat), I personally feel very strongly about animal rights and about getting my nutrients elsewhere. So, this would be devastating for anyone with a soul to see, but ESPECIALLY devastating to a seven and a half month pregnant, hormonal vegetarian with heightened emotions. I was absolutely bawling. Upon closer inspection, as I choked on my own tears and frantically asked what we were going to do, how we were going to save her, could we pick her up…Spencer looked at me very seriously and said, “Farm life, babe. I’m having chicken for dinner.” Um, what?! The idea was appalling to me. I mean, he eats chicken, I even buy it for him sometimes. But this was OUR chicken. Her name was Jane, she was OURS. Nope, nope, nope, I couldn’t even fathom it. A little caveat to this story…about a week before, Spencer had broken his ax chopping wood (it was old), so he told me he’d be back, left me sobbing next to this chicken—who in his mind, was suffering and needed to be put out of her misery, because she was a chicken with two broken legs who wasn’t going to survive to live a decent life, so…dinner time—and went to town to get a new ax. The 45 minutes he was gone were all it took for me to google an scour my various chicken books…“how to splint a broken chicken leg”, “what to do if your chicken is injured”, “how to heal an injured chicken”, and so on. I was doing my research sitting in the grass next to Jane, warding off the other chickens, who came over to peck at the weakest link, which made me cry more, as it was starting to get dark.
Chickens are at the very bottom of just about every food chain, so when it starts to get dark they have a natural instinct to look for cover. Our chickens know to go into their coop and roost at dusk. So, they were all hopping past their fallen comrade, heading to their cozy roost. Bless her heart, Jane, tried to go with them. I will never forget how she kept trying to get up, balancing on one leg (clearly that one wasn’t broken after all), then face planting again. Over and over she tried. When Spencer came home and stood out the porch with an ax over his shoulder, as those thunder clouds rumbled menacingly (I’m not even joking, the scene was that dramatic), I cried, “You put that thing away! I have gauze and popsicle sticks and I am saving this chicken!”
There was a brief conversation during which Spencer tried to tell me that she wouldn’t live a good life, and I told him she clearly wanted to live because she was trying to roost, and obviously she had a fierce heart and a champion spirit. He knew he wasn’t going to win, and gave me three weeks to heal that chicken.
And heal her I did. Upon closer inspection inside, her leg was not broken but seemed to have a torn muscle. She had two puncture wounds from Cooper’s teeth, which we cleaned and clotted. Then we lay her down with food, water, and pine shavings in the old Tupperware we had raised the baby chicks in. I also gave her Cooper’s joint supplements in her food and CBD in her water. After a couple weeks of healing, she was up on her leg, with a bit of a hobble, but up, walking, and able to roost. It took about a week and a half to reintegrate her to the flock (see my post on chicken integration for tips and tricks), and all was back to normal. Except that we started noticing Jane was acting a little weird. Sometimes, she slept on the floor of the coop instead of roosting. Her comb and wattles were developing a little differently than the other chickens. Could she be a rooster, we wondered…Nah, we told ourselves, she’s a chicken. And so life went on. None of the chickens had started laying yet—by this point they were only 4 months old, adolescents really. Life continued to go on, Jane continued to be a weirdo. Maybe she’s a weirdo because she went through a traumatic experience, I thought to myself. Even still, now I absolutely adored her, she was my little champion chicken, with a strong will to live and determination to heal. I admired her even. Now she trusted me, she would let me pick her up and come running to me when I went toward the coop.
Time passed, summer turned to fall, as it does. My due date came and went. At 40 weeks and 5 days, our daughter graced us with her bright and shining self. Two days later, we were home with our baby girl, adjusting to life as new parents. That first night home was exhausting, but I didn’t mind. I was up with Emmi, snuggling and nursing, throughout the night. I didn’t wake up to the sun coming in the windows that first morning home. I didn’t wake up to my newborn baby crying either. I woke up to COCK A DOODLE DOO. Jane was a rooster.
Crump Family Farms 