White Leghorns

THE last faint rumble of the retreating wagon fell upon the ear as something significant and epochal. Fifty miles to westward passed the nearest railroad line; fifty miles to eastward the next nearest. Northward and southward the distance was so great as to be non-negotiable. On every hand, high, dry, and untamed, stretched the Central Oregon plateau. Richly timbered mountains and deep river-clefts made occasional dots and lines upon its vastness.

At the Pilgrim’s back and on her right rose picturesque buttes; before her and to her left, smooth slopes of wash land, thickly grown with graygreen sagebrush and dotted with junipers, stretched to the Crooked River valley beyond which rose a mountain range. No human habitation was in sight. Overhead the dense foliage of a symmetrical juniper tree preserved a fresh coolness of shade from the brooding heat of the June day.

Under the Pilgrim’s hand, a shaggy brown dog, absolutely relaxed, rested from the weary exertions of his long journey. Behind her, her trunk stood on end, and against it leaned a tent rolled and strapped. She had just opened a series of three splint baskets fastened on a rod, and now, on every hand, leaping, flying, running, springing into the air to clap ecstatic wings, chirping a babel of wild delight, ninety balls of straw-colored down — potential White Leghorn fowls, just four days out of incubator, celebrated their freedom.

Six weeks ago, the Pilgrim had stood in the Grand Central station, New York City, buying her ticket for Portland. Now she was at home. One hundred and sixty acres lying about her were already entered in her name on Uncle Sam’s records. Tent and trunk and downy flock were house and barns and blooded stock in embryo. ‘ Chickens and wheat’ she had decided when she staked the claim. Hence the now liberated occupants of the three splint baskets. Let the Pilgrim tell the story of the Leghorn flock.

If you have tenderly conducted an incubator throughout the normal three weeks of operation you feel much of a mother’s proprietorship in the emerging brood. Your normal temperature rises, and persists for the time being at one hundred and three degrees. Your testing incubator hand becomes as sensitive as the thermometer. If you lack the desirable basement for your machine, you become keenly aware of all weather changes, but regard them as significant only as they may run the temperature up or down in that dark and dreamy chamber crowded with nascent existences. Daily you turn the white eggs with tender anticipation. You are reduced to despair when you break one and a little live embryo flounders helplessly in the released albumen.

You will never forget that night of the cold snap, when you woke from prolonged slumber and, anxiously seeking the incubator, found the mercury low in the nineties and steadily sinking. You put on all steam, but still it fell. You frantically built a fire and introduced pans of hot water above and below the eggs. The quicksilver was now out of sight. (It is characteristic of an incubator thermometer to continue indefinitely in the direction in which it has got a start.) After ages of waiting, it appeared again. Very slowly and lingeringly it slid upward and, some time in the next forenoon, stood once more at 103. You cherished small hope, and your sky was darkened.

Next came that sudden heat wave. You had ventured on an excursion several miles from home. Returned, you flew to the incubator; you annihilated the brightly burning flame; you stared stupidly at the thermometer. It did n’t seem to register at all. Slowly you realized that the mercury was now out of sight — no telling how far — above 110. You were vanquished then? Down and out? Still, you took out the tray of eggs and set it upon cool, wet towels. You laid cool, wet towels upon the eggs. Inwardly sobbing, you awaited the pleasure of Mercury, wishing that the whimsical onlooker would depart and allow you to bawl!

Still you pursued your hopeless round, on the bare chance that, even after the chill and the cremation, some sparks of life might survive.

Two days before the classic three weeks was accomplished, you were fulfilling your daily duty to the machine, when you were arrested by a faint but vigorous hail. Bird, mouse, or cricket? You stayed your hand in wonder. Then, from directly beneath that hand, it came again — a chirp, this time piercing and insistent! An egg was pipped! The next morning, a limp and draggled pioneer had successfully arrived and lay weak and panting on the warm eggs. The whole chamber was alive with peeps and tappings. To your resuscitated hopes, every egg was cracked. By night, the machine resembled nothing but a corn-popper at its crisis. Brisk snappings, momentary evolutions, and first shrill cries of protest against the hardships of existence continued into the small hours. You oscillated feverishly between your couch and this cradle of a feathered brood.

On the final morning — the sun well up and chill departed — you tremblingly approached the machine with carefully lined and padded basket. Stooping to turn the little buttons that hold the door, you became aware of three brand-new personalities, attired in softest cream-colored down, standing observantly together at the tiny round window in the door, and regarding you sagely with the brightest of black eyes.

Within, was a seething multitude, soft as thistledown, beautiful as flowers. You still trembled as you lifted to their new nest the spry and dry and fit, counting them meanwhile. A tardy minority must remain in the incubator for a little further maturing and polishing off. By night you had them all out

— a three-fourths hatch — a contented, whispering, cuddling, exquisite possession. This your chilled and roasted brood, your forlorn hope!

Such a brood as this I liberated four days later under the juniper tree in Central Oregon.

And how grew they? At the age of two days the sprouting of the feathered wing is an accomplished fact, and, at two weeks, it has become a pearly shield covering the entire side — lustrous as a shell, exquisite in tint and curve. Elsewhere, the straw-colored down persists, only gradually yielding to the coming plumage, till, at six weeks, the little head alone has the creamy hue, and, at two months, I have a flock of snow-white doves, — for the Leghorn is, in fact, more bird than fowl,

— this early and excessive development of wing indicating special powers of aviation. Like the subject of the old hymn, the Leghorn ‘would rather fly than go.’ Watch a flock of Leghorn hens take an eight-foot fence at standing flight, or sail over a good portion of a block to reach a desired feeding-ground.

In considering the beauty of the little wings, one recalls that the progenitors of these chicks inhabited a land of Art, called Italy, and one wonders if, for certain cherubic appendages, Michael and Raphael and the rest may not have impressed a little flock of feathered models to serve at the point where the human infant lacked a limb.

It is this light, and flitting, and birdlike quality that is, to me, one of the chief attractions of my flock, though I realize that to the fleshly eye, that sees a chicken always in the shadow of the dinner-pot, or, in its extreme youth, regards it as ‘a little fry,’ there are serious disqualifications. In fact, one would not keep a Leghorn for a market fowl, although, at six or eight months, given a contented and well-fed youth, the result is a very delicate and sufficiently plump little body.