“_The trivial round, the common task._”
Few people recognise how strong an element the sense of duty is in the
lives of cocks and hens.
I have a Minorca cock of superb appearance and excellent principles.
I had to cut his wings once, and I felt as if I had hit a Member of
Parliament in the face. It is from him I take my standard.
He receives new hens into his flock with an impressive ceremony. When
they are turned into the yard in the approved condition of screaming
hysterics, he assembles his old flock about him, and proceeds in a
kind of agitated procession towards the newcomers. Then the cock comes
a few paces in advance, and with ruffled neck struts and scrapes in
front of them. Finally he goes off to the farmyard, the hens following
respectfully behind him, the newcomers last of all, pecked and hustled
by the rest to make them feel at home.
To his flock of hens the cock stands in much the same position as a hen
towards her chickens. It is only the roughness of the instruments they
have at hand which misleads us about the particular duty which each is
fulfilling.
If a chicken falls on its back it must be remembered that the only
instruments by which the hen can help it to regain its feet are a beak
and a claw. This is like helping a newborn infant with a sword and a
gun. With the full use of ten fingers I feel some anxiety about picking
up a chicken. I should quite refuse to do it with a beak and a claw.
The hen is braver. She first pecks the chicken to stimulate it to
exertion, and then she turns and kicks it. This latter plan is usually
the more successful.
But in case of hostilities it must be remembered the hen has only the
same two instruments at command. She first pecks her foe and then kicks
him. Thus the thoughtless are apt to confound the different intentions
in the similarity of method.
In the same way if a hen, called suddenly from an orgie of herring
heads in the farmyard to a meal of corn in her own enclosure, forgets
where the gate is and tries to get in through the wiring, the cock has
only one possible method of helping her. He flies at her from the other
side and pecks her. This is not hostile, but protective; he is helping
her to recover her self-control. When he has succeeded in reminding her
that she cannot hope to get through galvanised wire netting he will
accompany her politely round to the gate, and bring her to her food.
The range of duties is large. To help thirteen hens to keep their
heads in the various emergencies of life is a heavy responsibility;
add to this that the cock keeps time for them, assembles them to their
meals, separates fighters, keeps a sick hen away from the flock, or
bears a shy one company while she eats; it will be evident that the
self-control of the cock in the matter of food is well matched by his
organising ability.
There is only one thing which clashes with the imperative sense of duty
of the barn-door fowl, and that is its tendency to romantic attachments.
I had two hens sitting side by side in their first experience of
nesting. Daily they were found with dazed faces, ruffled and pecked as
we took them out; woke from their angry trance as they felt the earth
beneath, took their dust baths, ate, drank, and returned, to fall again
into a condition half comatose and half savage.
Thus they spent but twenty minutes daily in the enjoyment of each
other’s society.
One brood came out five days before the other. The hen was found with
an expression of scared surprise on her face, as instead of nine smooth
silent eggs, she felt the downy creatures move and heard them cry. She
and her brood were removed, and the other sat on with glazed eye till
her turn came.
Then we took her also and lodged her next to the first; they had
separate dwelling-houses and a common yard. We were only afraid that
maternal tenderness would lead to a little pecking of the alien brood.
But it appeared that we had wholly miscalculated. While they sat
dreaming side by side or took the refreshing dust bath, those hens had
sworn eternal friendship. Although like a Boarding-Out Committee under
the Local Government Act, the two hens were individually responsible
for both broods, the chickens (unlike the children) were quite a
secondary consideration. The hens’ main object in life was to sit as
close to each other as they could, and the chickens squeezed themselves
into corners, roosted on the hens’ backs, or moped in isolation.
When one chicken had nearly died of exposure, and three had been
flattened under the combined weight of the hens, we removed the worst
mother. On this she lost all the little wits she had ever possessed,
and haunted the chicken enclosure like an unquiet spirit. It took the
cock a long time to restore her self-control.
But I have a far darker tale to tell. There lived in a neat little
house on a lawn a gold and red bantam cock with two golden brown hens.
The darker was his favourite wife, but the three lived harmoniously,
and the hens laid an egg daily.
Fifteen of these eggs were hatched out under a common barn-door fowl.
She had no breeding and no tail; her colour was an undertone of black,
irregularly sprinked with grey. She was cooped with the chickens about
a hundred yards from the bantams, and screened from them by a shrubbery.
About this time the favourite bantam hen found an attractive heap of
faggots: thither she repaired daily to lay an egg. When she had laid a
dozen she sat down to hatch them. She had chosen her place well, for
her golden brown feathers showed hardly at all against the wrinkled,
russet leaves.
While she sat peacefully hidden the cock had heard the hen and chickens
call; and, strolling to the other side of the shrubbery, discovered his
fifteen children with their foster-mother. Thenceforward, from morning
till night, he squatted near the coop, leaving the little favourite
wife in her æsthetic bower, and the paler little wife to her own neat
house.
It might be thought that paternal instinct kept him there, the joy of
seeing his young family grow daily more like their mothers and himself;
the dawning hope of the time when he should scratch for the young hens
and pull the tail feathers out of the little cocks.
Not so; he was enchained by the attractions of that large, common,
tailless fowl. Doubtless he thought her a fine large hen; so she was,
quite four times his size. Perhaps he admired her figure, and thought
her colouring a unique beauty.
Certain it is that just when the little hen was leading out a tiny
family, the bantam cock, deserting his two wives and his twenty-seven
children, fled with the common hen into the woods.
There they lived in a wild and wicked romance. People passing through
the wood at evening might see a very small gold cock and a very large
speckled hen sitting side by side on the branch of a tree; or in
the morning might catch sight of the pair digging for a precarious
livelihood in the grass at the covert edge; glancing round with guilty
eyes and fleeing for safety into the bushes.
At last disillusionment came; it was sure to come. The cock went home.
He returned to find that _all the first family were dead and that eight
of the second family were cocks_.
This is tragedy, but it is also history.