Virginian (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (13 page)

That afternoon the Virginian and I had gone duck shooting. We had found several in a beaver dam, and I had killed two as they sat close together; but they floated against the breastwork of sticks out in the water some four feet deep, where the escaping current might carry them down the stream. The Judge’s red setter had not accompanied us, because she was expecting a family.

“We don’t want her along anyways,” the cow-puncher had explained to me. “She runs around mighty irresponsible, and she’ll stand a prairie-dog ’bout as often as she’ll stand a bird. She’s a triflin’ animal.”

My anxiety to own the ducks caused me to pitch into the water with all my clothes on, and subsequently crawl out a slippery, triumphant, weltering heap. The Virginian’s serious eyes had rested upon this spectacle of mud; but he expressed nothing, as usual.

“They ain’t overly good eatin’,” he observed, tying the birds to his saddle. “They’re divers.”

“Divers!” I exclaimed. “Why didn’t they dive?”

“I reckon they was young ones and hadn’t experience.”

“Well,” I said, crestfallen, but attempting to be humorous, “I did the diving myself.”

But the Virginian made no comment. He handed me my double-barrelled English gun, which I was about to leave deserted on the ground behind me, and we rode home in our usual silence, the mean little white-breasted, sharp-billed divers dangling from his saddle.

It was in the bunk-house that he took his revenge. As I passed I heard his gentle voice silently achieving some narrative to an attentive audience, and just as I came by the open window where he sat on his bed in shirt and drawers, his back to me, I heard his concluding words, “And the hat on his haid was the one mark showed yu’ he weren’t a snappin’-turtle.”

The anecdote met with instantaneous success, and I hurried away into the dark.

The next morning I was occupied with the chickens. Two hens were fighting to sit on some eggs that a third was daily laying, and which I did not want hatched, and for the third time I had kicked Em’ly off seven potatoes she had rolled together and was determined to raise I know not what sort of family from. She was shrieking about the hen-house as the Virginian came in to observe (I suspect) what I might be doing now that could be useful for him to mention in the bunk-house.

He stood awhile, and at length said, “We lost our best rooster when Mrs. Henry came to live hyeh.”

I paid no attention.

“He was a right elegant Dominicker,” he continued.

I felt a little ruffled about the snapping-turtle, and showed no interest in what he was saying, but continued my functions among the hens. This unusual silence of mine seemed to elicit unusual speech from him.

“Yu’ see, that rooster he’d always lived round hyeh when the Judge was a bachelor, and he never seen no ladies or any persons wearing female gyarments. You ain’t got rheumatism, seh?”

“Me? No.”

“I reckoned maybe them little old divers yu’ got damp goin’ afteh—” He paused.

“Oh, no, not in the least, thank you.”

“Yu’ seemed sort o’ grave this mawnin‘, and I’m cert’nly glad it ain’t them divers.”

“Well, the rooster?” I inquired finally.

“Oh, him! He weren’t raised where he could see petticoats. Mrs. Henry she come hyeh from the railroad with the Judge afteh dark. Next mawnin’ early she walked out to view her new home, and the rooster was a-feedin’ by the door, and he seen her. Well, seh, he screeched that awful I run out of the bunk-house; and he jus’ went over the fence and took down Sunk Creek shoutin’ fire, right along. He has never come back.”

“There’s a hen over there now that has no judgment,” I said, indicating Em’ly. She had got herself outside the house, and was on the bars of a corral, her vociferations reduced to an occasional squawk. I told him about the potatoes.

“I never knowed her name before,” said he. “That runaway rooster, he hated her. And she hated him same as she hates ‘em all.”

“I named her myself,” said I, “after I came to notice her particularly, There’s an old maid at home who’s charitable, and belongs to the Cruelty to Animals,
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and she never knows whether she had better cross in front of a street car or wait. I named the hen after her. Does she ever lay eggs?”

The Virginian had not “troubled his haid” over the poultry.

“Well, I don’t believe she knows how. I think she came near being a rooster.”

“She’s sure manly-lookin‘,” said the Virginian. We had walked toward the corral, and he was now scrutinizing Em’ly with interest.

She was an egregious fowl. She was huge and gaunt, with great yellow beak, and she stood straight and alert in the manner of responsible people. There was something wrong with her tail. It slanted far to one side, one feather in it twice as long as the rest. Feathers on her breast there were none. These had been worn entirely off by her habit of sitting upon potatoes and other rough abnormal objects. And this lent to her appearance an air of being décolleté,
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singularly at variance with her otherwise prudish ensemble. Her eye was remarkably bright, but somehow it had an outraged expression. It was as if she went about the world perpetually scandalized over the doings that fell beneath her notice. Her legs were blue,
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long, and remarkably stout.

“She’d ought to wear knickerbockers,” murmured the Virginian. “She’d look a heap better’n some o’ them college students. And she’ll set on potatoes, yu’ say?”

“She thinks she can hatch out anything. I’ve found her with onions, and last Tuesday I caught her on two balls of soap.”

In the afternoon the tall cow-puncher and I rode out to get an antelope.

After an hour, during which he was completely taciturn, he said: “I reckon maybe this hyeh lonesome country ain’t been healthy for Em’ly to live in. It ain’t for some humans. Them old trappers in the mountains gets skewed in the haid mighty often, an’ talks out loud when nobody’s nigher’n a hundred miles.”

“Em’ly has not been solitary,” I replied. “There are forty chickens here.”

“That’s so,” said he. “It don’t explain her.”

He fell silent again, riding beside me, easy and indolent in the saddle. His long figure looked so loose and inert that the swift, light spring he made to the ground seemed an impossible feat. He had seen an antelope where I saw none.

“Take a shot yourself,” I urged him, as he motioned me to be quick. “You never shoot when I’m with you.”

“I ain’t hyeh for that,” he answered. “Now you’ve let him get away on yu’!”

The antelope had in truth departed.

“Why,” he said to my protest, “I can hit them things any day. What’s your notion as to Em’ly?”

“I can’t account for her,” I replied.

“Well,” he said musingly, and then his mind took one of those particular turns that made me love him. “Taylor ought to see her. She’d be just the schoolmarm for Bear Creek!”

“She’s not much like the eating-house lady at Medicine Bow,” I said.

He gave a hilarious chuckle. “No, Em’ly knows nothing o’ them joys. So yu’ have no notion about her? Well, I’ve got one. I reckon maybe she was hatched after a big thunderstorm.”

“A big thunderstorm!” I exclaimed.

“Yes. Don’t yu’ know about them, and what they’ll do to aiggs? A big case o’ lightnin’ and thunder will addle aiggs and keep ‘em from hatchin’. And I expect one came along, and all the other aiggs of Em‘ly’s set didn’t hatch out, but got plumb addled, and she happened not to get addled that far, and so she just managed to make it through. But she cert’nly ain’t got a strong haid.”

“I fear she has not,” said I.

“Mighty hon‘ble intentions,” he observed. “If she can’t make out to lay anything, she wants to hatch somethin’, and be a mother, anyways”.

“I wonder what relation the law considers that a hen is to the chicken she hatched but did not lay?” I inquired.

The Virginian made no reply to this frivolous suggestion. He was gazing over the wide landscape gravely and with apparent inattention. He invariably saw game before I did, and was off his horse and crouched among the sage while I was still getting my left foot clear of the stirrup. I succeeded in killing an antelope, and we rode home with the head and hind quarters.

“No,” said he. “It’s sure the thunder, and not the lonesomeness. How do yu’ like the lonesomeness yourself?”

I told him that I liked it.

“I could not live without it now,” he said. “This has got into my system.” He swept his hand out at the vast space of world. “I went back home to see my folks onced. Mother was dyin’ slow, and she wanted me. I stayed a year. But them Virginia mountains could please me no more. Afteh she was gone, I told my brothers and sisters good-by. We like each other well enough, but I reckon I’ll not go back.”

We found Em’ly seated upon a collection of green California peaches, which the Judge had brought from the railroad.

“I don’t mind her any more,” I said; “I’m sorry for her.”

“I’ve been sorry for her right along,” said the Virginian. “She does hate the roosters so.” And he said that he was making a collection of every class of object which he found her treating as eggs.

But Em‘ly’s egg-industry was terminated abruptly one morning, and her unquestioned energies diverted to a new channel. A turkey which had been sitting in the root-house appeared with twelve children, and a family of bantams occurred almost simultaneously. Em’ly was importantly scratching the soil inside Paladin’s corral when the bantam tribe of newly born came by down the lane, and she caught sight of them through the bars. She crossed the corral at a run, and intercepted two of the chicks that were trailing somewhat behind their real mamma. These she undertook to appropriate, and assumed a high tone with the bantam, who was the smaller, and hence obliged to retreat with her still numerous family. I interfered, and put matters straight, but the adjustment was only temporary. In an hour I saw Em’ly immensely busy with two more bantams, leading them about and taking a care of them which I must admit seemed perfectly efficient.

And now came the first incident that made me suspect her to be demented.

She had proceeded with her changelings behind the kitchen, where one of the irrigation ditches ran under the fence from the hay-field to supply the house with water. Some distance along this ditch inside the field were the twelve turkeys in the short, recently cut stubble. Again Em‘ly set off instantly like a deer. She left the dismayed bantams behind her. She crossed the ditch with one jump of her stout blue legs, flew over the grass, and was at once among the turkeys, where, with an instinct of maternity as undiscriminating as it was reckless, she attempted to huddle some of them away. But this other mamma was not a bantam, and in a few moments Em’ly was entirely routed in her attempt to acquire a new variety of family.

This spectacle was witnessed by the Virginian and myself, and it overcame him. He went speechless across to the bunk-house, by himself, and sat on his bed, while I took the abandoned bantams back to their own circle.

I have often wondered what the other fowls thought of all this. Some impression it certainly did make upon them. The notion may seem out of reason to those who have never closely attended to other animals than man; but I am convinced that any community which shares some of our instincts will share some of the resulting feelings, and that birds and beasts have conventions, the breach of which startles them. If there be anything in evolution,
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this would seem inevitable. At all events, the chicken-house was upset during the following several days. Em’ly disturbed now the bantams and now the turkeys, and several of these latter had died, though I will not go so far as to say that this was the result of her misplaced attentions. Nevertheless, I was seriously thinking of locking her up till the broods should be a little older, when another event happened, and all was suddenly at peace.

The Judge’s setter came in one morning, wagging her tail. She had had her puppies, and she now took us to where they were housed, in between the floor of a building and the hollow ground. Em’ly was seated on the whole litter.

“No,” I said to the Judge. “I am not surprised. She is capable of anything.”

In her new choice of offspring, this hen had at length encountered an unworthy parent. The setter was bored by her own puppies. She found the hole under the house an obscure and monotonous residence compared with the dining room, and our company more stimulating and sympathetic than that of her children. A muchpetted contact with our superior race had developed her dog intelligence above its natural level, and turned her into an unnatural, neglectful mother, who was constantly forgetting her nursery for worldly pleasures.

At certain periods of the day she repaired to the puppies and fed them, but came away when this perfunctory ceremony was accomplished; and she was glad enough to have a governess bring them up. She made no quarrel with Em‘ly, and the two understood each other perfectly. I have never seen among animals any arrangements so civilized and so perverted. It made Em’ly perfectly happy. To see her sitting all day jealously spreading her wings over some blind puppies was sufficiently curious; but when they became large enough to come out from under the house and toddle about in the proud hen’s wake, I longed for some distinguished naturalist. I felt that our ignorance made us inappropriate spectators of such a phenomenon. Em’ly scratched and clucked, and the puppies ran to her, pawed her with their fat limp little legs, and retreated beneath her feathers in their games of hide and seek. Conceive, if you can, what confusion must have reigned in their infant minds as to who the setter was!

“I reckon they think she’s the wet-nurse,” said the Virginian.

When the puppies grew to be boisterous, I perceived that Em‘ly’s mission was approaching its end. They were too heavy for her, and their increasing scope of playfulness was not in her line. Once or twice they knocked her over, upon which she arose and pecked them severely, and they retired to a safe distance, and sitting in a circle, yapped at her. I think they began to suspect that she was only a hen after all. So Em’ly resigned with an indifference which surprised me, until I remembered that if it had been chickens, she would have ceased to look after them by this time.