I used to make fun of chickens, I often wrote about how dumb they were, but I was appropriately scolded by chicken lovers and experts and changed my arrogant tune. I started paying more attention to chickens, and I realized that, like many animals, they are quite smart about what they need to be smart about and not much aware of anything else. Like the other animals and people in the Northern hemisphere, the chickens had a tough winter, they were holed up in their roost for months, we hauled feed and warm water into them. I did not have a light or a heat lamp in the roost, chickens do well in cold, they have high body temperatures and crowd together.

But I am installing a work light for next year, it will be encased in steel and glass so it won’t get too hot or touch the hay. We open the roost doors when we get up, the hens come hopping out and make their rounds of the grounds. They never go on or near the road, at various intervals the three of them will either find a spot in the sun to lie down in or if it’s hot, some shade. They are industrious, pecking along the ground for worms and bugs or bits of leaves and twigs. They are fed corn mash every morning, and Maria ferries various exotic leftovers out to them – she brings them care packages from restaurants also.

We gave up giving chickens names, ours were not living long, picked off by hawks and foxes, since we stopped giving them names nobody has died except for Strut the rooster, who I shot after he attacked Maria. You are not the biggest rooster here, I told him before pulling the trigger. He was good-looking but fairly useless otherwise, and the girls do not seem to miss him in the least. They get along well with one another, no problems or squabbles and we like seeing them marching back and forth industriously during the day.

They are at ease around us – any animal afraid of Maria is foolish or ill – and they are especially fond of Red. Chickens, like dogs, like tradition, they make the same rounds every day at more or less the same time. The life of chickens is soothing, regular, calming. The slip into the background of the place, part of it yet apart from it. We are even getting an egg now and then.