Birds or Prey

Just a few minutes ago, as I sat on my front stoop reading, an eagle or a hawk – some bird of prey – swooped down and lifted away one of the four chicks that have been ambling about the yard for the last week or so. My neighbor Alice had her son build a chicken coop over the last school holidays. This is the first set of new chicks. I have enjoyed watching them wandering about in formation behind their mother. I have attempted to stop them from eating Styrofoam. I have enjoyed – ever so slightly - the prospect of doing dishes because I know that once I sit down with the basin I use for cleaning, they will make their way over, awaiting the dumping of the inevitable bits of soaked rice or beans that stick to the bottom of my pots.
One of them is gone now and I have never seen such behavior from these chickens. Three of them ran under my legs and into my house in the aftermath; it took ten minutes and a broom to get them back out.
Generally, I was under the impression that the chickens had a pretty sweet life here. They wander about the compound. They peck at nothing. Sometimes they run rapidly from one end to the other fleeing some imagined danger that I cannot perceive, much less imagine. They eat, they poop, I would assume they sleep, though I have never actually observed this first hand (Alice assures me that it does occur). Periodically, it seems, they also watch their offspring get plucked off the ground and carried away into the air to be devoured in a tree. I find it ironic – given that they are birds, but because they are chickens– that neither the air nor the tree that figure so prominently in this fate are in any way conceivable to them. They are, after all, flightless birds who live in a box.
It’s clear – from their retreat to covered space of my own home – that they don’t imagine being plucked away into the sky is good. They didn’t watch it with that brainless, steady stare that seems to characterize most of their day. But I can’t see how they could know exactly what has occurred. They don’t hang out at bars with other birds who might be able to explain to them what a hawk is or where they live or how they hunt. (Unless they are sneaking out late at night when I am already asleep.)
As I write, they have regained their composure, collapsed back into their habits. I wonder if they are noticing that it is slightly easier to find food now that there is one less mouth. In any case, the event itself, is over. Little Cornell – as he may very well have been named – is gone. I somehow doubt that his sudden reappearance would engender a response anything like the one that accompanied his removal.
And I must say, dramatic though it may be, I find the return to normalcy rather comforting. For those that remain, the exigencies of their daily life will not wait. The extent to which they understand that Cornell is dead or dying - that one of the beings with whom they have spent every single moment of their brief little lives is gone and will not return - is meaningless. Whether they grasp it or not, whether they have little chicken tears welling up in their beady unblinking eyes, this fact is secondary to the fact that they are, frankly, still kind of hungry.
Life isn’t cruel so much as it is ongoing. There is a comforting certainty for me in the fact that in the long run, the basic overwhelming needs that drive life also ensure that no tragedy can be too overwhelming. No matter what else is lost or taken away, no matter how shocking or dark an event may be, I will probably still like bacon an awful lot. The tremendous towers of anxiety and fear and joy and confusion that I build as I attempt to create meaning in every individual happening of my life cannot dispel the fact that I need to eat, I need to sleep. That, right now, I kind of need to pee. And I know I’m just building another tower here, but this one has a stability I find soothing.