Apollo Is Dead

            Apollo is dead.  It happened late, under a fat moon, on the first hot night of this young summer.  But I get ahead of myself.

            Our friend Brian had two roosters.  We had eight hens and no rooster.  That cool spring day a year ago the kids and I visited Brian and toured his chicken stockade.  The kids fixated on the young Barred Rock rooster; big and ugly even then but for the beautiful speckled gray and white feathers.  He had a long, thick neck leading to a squawking annoying voice.  The kids wrestled the homely beast to the ground.  We had our rooster.

The name, Apollo, was not my idea.  At first I didn’t get it.  Now I get it.  Roosters are known to crow with the dawn (which is true, but not the whole story and more about that later) hence he was named by our mythologically-mad son after the Sun God. 

Introducing a new bird to an old flock is never easy and the hens did not take to Apollo when he first joined us.  He was meek and shy, the girls confident and bold.  They nearly pecked him to death.  He could not sleep in the coop; instead roosting high in the old milking-parlor, climbing onto the worn wooden stanchions, sitting with his back to the laying hens.

When young Apollo did not crow, he trumpeted poorly, like a sick swan, pulling the noise up through his fat goose neck.  He kept his distance from the girls, ate a lot, trumpeted a lot and acted the awkward growing boy.  We liked him then, the way you can like even a young ferret.  And then he learned to crow.

It is commonly believed roosters’ crow to welcome the dawn.  They do, but it is not because they are welcoming the dawn.  It is because they crow all of the time, which means the crowing sometimes coincides with the dawn.  Roosters worthy of the name simply strut and crow and demand attention at all hours, in all situations and with no grace.  Apollo, a true cockerel, did not merely crow in the dawn, he crowed in the noon, the sunset, the moon, the darkest hours of the night, a grain stealing mouse.  He crowed in pretty much every single happening at our little red house. 

We grew used to the sound, and claimed in fact to like it, and now we miss it, but we miss it the way people living under the glide path at Heathrow missed the jets when the volcanoes’ blew: not a lot and not really.  After he learned to crow, he learned to rooster.

To be a rooster is to be surly, strutting, unpredictable, unbearable.  Apollo became a young man.  As a pre-teen, Apollo was shy and quiet.  As a juvenile he would literally sneak up and bite your ankles.  He once walked up behind me in the garden (he was so big and came so fast I thought it was the dog).  Before I turned around he jumped me from behind and got me good.  Unfortunately for the rooster I was using a hoe at the time.  He was a hooligan – attack for attack sake.  No rhyme or reason.

Everyone with backyard chickens has a rooster tale.  The need to go into the coop armed with an old aluminum garbage lid and a stick, like a boy playing knight with a sword and shield; the small shed used for solitary confinement when visitors come by; the rooster who attacks the dog so much the dog stops going outside; the rooster who drives the children away.

We reached the point with Apollo where we did not call him our rooster, we called him our roaster.  We looked up recipes for coq a vin, literally ‘rooster in wine,’ which demands the use of an old, cranky bird.  The kids walked through the back yard carrying sticks.

And then we had a first hot summer’s night.  Jackie asked if anyone had locked the door to the chicken coop, I said I’d go and then forgot.  We got the kids to bed, opened all the windows against the heat, and turned on fans as though it were August.  All was peaceful late in the night; a breeze blew strong and a full moon cast a cool light.   And then came death.

What woke me was that awful trumpeting, but this time it was firm, not wobbly.  Trumpeting and then violent squawking and then what is the closest a chicken can come to a curdling scream.  I ran to the mud room and grabbed a flash light and the only fire-arm in the house, my son’s lever-action Red-Ryder bb gun.  I was out the door and around to the back in a flash, weapon and light at the ready.  By the edge of the hay field was a fisher, pushing Apollo into the ground, and before I could fire off one pea from that tiny gun he was gone.

I ran to check on the coop and all was fine.  The ladies were on their perches, clucking like mad hens but not dead or bloodied or gone.  I tracked the thin trail of barred rock feathers across the lawn to the edge of the field.  I pieced together a likely scenario.

The fisher came in through the open coop door.  Apollo sensed the fisher and let out that first trumpet, to signal the alarm.  He leapt down to come between the fisher and the flock.  Chickens are night blind, so Apollo’s leap was eyes wide shut; he was shouting (in chicken) all the time.  Only flashes of moonlight guiding his mad rush at the fisher, wings spread, hackles up, chicken claws aimed at the predator’s beady eyes.  The fisher and the bird fought a mighty battle. 

I imagine the final scene: Apollo fighting off the grip of the fisher’s powerful jaw, turning to the flock and saying – in Chicken – “Don’t.  Follow.  Me.  Don’t.  Yell.  Out.  Stay safe.”  A pause in the fighting, a moment of tension so thick the air crackled, and Apollo’s last words:  “I love you.”  The jaws close on the bird’s neck.  Apollo is dead.

I told the kids about the adventure in the morning.  “Oh, he was so beautiful,” “oh, he was our rooster,” and “oh, I’ll really miss him.” 

‘Give it a rest,’ I said.  ‘You chased him with a stick and we called him the roaster.’  The kids became indignant.  Our little girl summed it up: 

“Dad!” she shouted.  “He defended his ladies!  He died noble!  I loved him!”  I can only aspire to such an epitaph.

(c) 2010 David Rocchio