Killer Chickens Of Hillmomba

I sat down at the big living room window this morning. The one that looks out on the front yard of the Mansion. There's no window seat or furniture arrangement highlighting our eye on the world. It's not like this is the Palace of Versailles. It's the Hillbilly Mansion, for cryin' out loud. Which means that I plopped my ample posterior down on the end of a coffee table with part of the surface peeled away from a sticky-mouse-pad faux pas by the #1 son. Not that this is the preferred seat. It happens to abut my laptop, Sheba, perched upon a wooden TV tray, the better to soak up satellite rays for my Sprint connect card internet dealybobber.

As I logged on to begin my day at 7:30 a.m., I noticed a commotion along the treeline. The treeline previously hidden by the fifth-wheel camper that sat in the front yard for twelve years before we gave it away. Let it not be said that the Hillbilly family is not charitable. These are not the actual woods woods. They're in the back of the Mansion. This is a stand of trees that surround the three sinkholes that run from the Mansion to the road an eighth of a mile away. Perhaps we should have had a geological survey assessment before having Farmer H's friend the sometimes felon frame up the Mansion and get it under roof in two days. Nah. That's what folks with common sense would do.

The commotion was caused by a black half-grown chicken. One of the new batch of sixteen, not the newest batch of five, which were happily cheep cheep cheeping with their momma in the goat pen. This dark adolescent fowl was running from a mob. Not an angry mob with pitchforks and torches, but an excited mob, with robbery in mind.

That black chicken scurried along the trees with a mouse in her beak. She veered into the open, ran toward the house, turned to my left at the rusty upturned antique metal washtub, darted past the lilac bush, crossed the brief expanse of grass next to the upended-brick-enclosed bed of lava rock, and disappeared under the rose bush. The mob followed. They soon vanished as well, so I'm thinking the skilled hunter hauled her deceased prey past the downspout and around the corner, where she shimmied through an opening in the lattice to an underporch lair.

Who knew that chickens killed mice? Not me! There was nary a cat or dog to be seen. The white fur of the mouse belly at first made me think this killer was carrying a piece of trash. A torn paper plate, perhaps. But when she came closer, I saw the dangling feet and tail. The head was not evident. It had either been pecked off, or was hanging under the beak behind the body.

I told Farmer H that he needs to keep a chicken or two in the garage. They'll show those lazy cats what mice are for.