BY HARRY WEEKES
It is 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 15. The day is clear, crisp, and beautiful—one of those fall days that invariably forces you to appreciate “The Nature.” The sky is piercingly blue. Groves of aspens, in pockets on the hillsides and clumped around houses, are adding their yellows and oranges and reds to the band of increasingly yellowing cottonwoods lining the river. And, of course, there is the wonderful earthy smell of fall.
All of this is made more acute because the vigil we have been having is over. I am walking up the hill behind my house with a dead bird tucked under my arm. Big Mama, our oldest chicken, who, by our best recollection, was somewhere between seven and 10 years old, finally slipped away sometime between my last visit and Hilary’s.
Honestly, in all of my years of pet ownership, I cannot remember a single one gently dying of old age. I am pretty sure this is what happened to Big Mama. On Saturday, she hobbled around in her aged way, sharply tugging at leftovers from various salads. By Sunday, she was simply lying on the ground, head stretched out, breathing slowly and deeply. I picked her up. With no obvious evidence of foul play, I put her back down and arranged her as comfortably as possible. By mid-afternoon, she had stopped breathing and with that had tangibly diminished in size.
Holding her outside of our hen house, my eyes settle on the small clump of chokecherries, willows, and a spruce tree tucked into one side of the hills out the back of our house. “That looks like a good spot.”
Simon comes out to say goodbye. I head up the hill. The procession is simple—me accompanied by crickets chirring from the side. I crunch through sage and bitterbrush, my climbing filling the air with the cool scents from their leaves.
The area is a cluster of trees and grasses, around a spring or a seep where the ground piles up, marking some small microclimate in an expanse of sagebrush. Deer bed down here, and there have to be rabbits. During last winter, a female coyote flushed from the bushes and cut a wide arc across the ridge between our house and Quigley. She stopped once, looked over her shoulder, and disappeared.
In this small grove of vegetation, I find a place where stems of grass have already died, and I place Big Mama snugly into a leafy bed that is also as comfortable as I can make it. I hold my hand on her feathers and press gently on her body. I turn around once, about 10 feet away, and take in as much of the scene as I can.
Big Mama has been a part of our lives since before I was 50, since all of my kids were home, since my son was still in single digits for age. She was a being with whom we shared a life. She was our only named chicken; a stoic and steadfast matriarch.
I don’t know what will happen to her remains. I do know they will be a part of this small valley on this perfect day. This is the best I come up with.
Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 52nd year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with Hilary and one of their three baby adults—Simon. The other members of the flock are Georgia and Penelope (Georgia recently fledged from Davidson College in North Carolina and Penelope is at Middlebury College in Vermont).
