I saw a YouTube piece on the “Today” show a while back that made me think about an incident in my kidhood; well, actually in my sister’s kidhood, I guess. I was only a spectator, not a participant in the event.
First of all, let me tell you about the YouTube, and then I’ll come back to my story. The film clip was about a rooster named McNugget in Issaquah, Wash. I did some research and found out that McNugget had escaped from the nearby Issaquah Grange Supply years ago as a chick and had adopted the parking lot of a Staples store as its new home. Employees of an espresso stand in the lot adopted the rooster, gave him his name and a crate for shelter.
About three years ago, a young woman who was a regular customer of the espresso stand provided a home upgrade to a doghouse and stopped by occasionally to feed McNugget. But she and a friend became very concerned when the temperatures dropped to overnight lows of 10 degrees.
“It looked like his comb was frost-bitten,” one of them said. “I just felt so bad for him, standing there shivering while I was feeding him.” She felt the owners should put a heat lamp in McNugget’s shelter.
One of the women offered the espresso stand owner hundreds of dollars to purchase McNugget, but the offer was declined.
“I would leave them alone if they put up a proper coop with a heating lamp,” she added. Protests were held, but no real resolution was established.
One of the articles I found said, “Charming though he can be, the rooster does have a cantankerous streak, known on occasion to attack people in wheelchairs and on bicycles and motorcycles.”
That statement was what sent my mind in rewind, and I thought about a time when a cantankerous old (or maybe young and studly, who could tell?) rooster attacked my sister, Joyce, when we were visiting at our grandparents’ farm near Lena when we were little kids.
I was probably about 5 and Joyce was 4. We had been warned by Grandpa Clyde that the rooster had a reputation as being mean and vicious, and we usually avoided him assiduously. He was huge (pumped up on steroids or performance enhancing drugs?), and he strutted smugly around the farmyard like a testosterone-charged Alex Rodriguez. Maybe he seemed so huge because we were so little, but I swear that bird came up to Joyce’s shoulder when he backed her into the woodpile behind the house.
Running full blast at her, his wings flapping violently, he jumped at her and smashed his feet (do roosters have talons?) into her bare legs repeatedly. I was screaming and crying, and Dad and Grandpa came running from the porch. Dad grabbed that raging bird’s legs and flung him 20 yards over the hen house fence and scooped Joyce up in his arms and ran for the house.
She had gashes on her knees and shins and beak marks on her forearms because she’d hidden her face behind her arms. She was hysterical, and big bruises were appearing on her legs and arms.
That picture is very clear in my mind, but when I asked Joyce about it when she visited here in early August, she said she had no memory of it.
She probably also doesn’t remember the big roasted chicken we had for dinner the next time we visited Grandma and Grandpa.
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