Something's up with the neighbourhood chickens. They're either psychotic, possessed... or getting organized.
For the last week, they've been erupting in synchronized volleys of ear-splitting cackling every hour from midnight to 5am. It's infuriating.
But in the light of day, it's impossible to tell who the leaders of The Resistance are. They all look uniformly dumb and innocent, the way that only chickens can.
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[Picture: "Who, me?" - Innocent Chicken]
We have four Nameless Chickens - Yudha refuses to christen them, for fear of engendering emotional attachment.
Codename 'Putih' (Indonesian for 'White') is the supremely cocky cock who repeatedly picks fights with longsuffering Wiro. These provocations usually end with Wiro chasing the disgraced Putih up onto the roof in a flurry of barking and feathers. Whereupon Putih pouts for a while before carrying on the insurgency by aiming droppings at Wiro from his perch.
'Hitam' ('Black') is a heartbreakingly stupid hen that needs to be chased around the bushes every morning just to be fed. Nameless Chickens #3 and #4 are singularly unremarkable souls: they spend their days in the coop, and apparently nurse no greater dreams.
Virtually every household here is home to at least one chicken: They're easy to acquire and rear, a couple of eggs a week may be the only source of protein for a family of 10, they're a traditional store of wealth. And yes, on occasion they do end up on the plate.
Should bird flu cross the border from Indonesia only a couple of hundred kilometres away, it's easy to imagine the mayhem that would result throughout rural Timor. There's very real potential for human/chicken/pig cross-infection; but any high-handed attempt to round up and cull poultry would be met with no less resistance than Herod's men in Bethlehem. Should push come to shove, I'm not at all sure that I wouldn't stand by my chickens myself.
But only if they'd let me sleep at night.
-raj
1 comment:
Never, never before in the history of mankind has the death of a chicken been compared to Herod of Judaea's siege and Massacre of the Innocents.
Raj, my dear man, you may not be the Saviour of Timor, but you most certainly are a Linguistic Trailblazer.
I KNEW there was a reason I liked you! :-D
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