It’s been a crazy week, has it not? Fractured, I’d say. Like a
conversation that can’t get started. Conversation among humans, as we know, is
an art; it is the same way with chickens. Sometimes those of us who are not
the best with humans also fail with poultry. Two examples: I suggested
yesterday that the weather was the kind of thing that makes dying of absinthe
seem like an attractive option. Silence. Blank stares with occasional
blinking. So I explained that I’d read that the soldiers who put down the
slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) were Poles who had joined
Napoleon’s armies to fight for freedom from Russia. Again, nothing.
We’ll return to the French later.
The visual relationship between Mimo and Mahatma Gandhi is not
immediately apparent, so those of an analytical bent of mind who seek to
compare the two may fall back on their involvement in politics. It’s a
stretch, or was until this week when Mimo declared that she would embark on a
fast-unto-death in order to get the current occupant of the White House to
concede. This came as something of a surprise to me and possibly to the rest
of those who know her. Mimo is what P.G. Wodehouse would call a sturdy
trencherman, a good eater, first to the food where it falls from my hands. For
her to stop eating was I naively supposed a sign that she was pining and
potentially mortally ill, so I took her breakfast in bed.
“Happy mothers day,” I said, spreading cheese rinds on the board of the
sleeping area.
Mimo, “What’s a mother?”
It’s extraordinary what gaps there are in some souls' vocabularies. How to
explain the concept of motherhood to one who has laid eggs all her life and not
known why? Better, I thought, to divert.
“The Orange One still hasn’t conceded.”
Mimo, “I know. As one of his rivals, I feel it incumbent upon myself to make a
grand gesture, so after breakfast I’m going to cease eating.”
“Could be dicey,” I said, “what with your lack of feathers and all. The nights
are fair drawing in. Should I bring you some zinc or something to brace you
up. Soup, maybe?”
Mimo, “What’s soup?”
Again I’d backed myself into a corner. Amazing how easy it is to do that
conversationally. Fortunately Appenzeller came up and shouted at her. “Buck
up. Get out of bed you lazy so-and-so.”
Mimo, “I’m protesting. Embarking on a fast-unto-death.”
Pecorino pointed out that she seemed to be starting her fast with cheese rinds
that hadn’t been distributed to all present.
Mimo is a miraculous bird who once returned from the dead, so I suppose
I shouldn’t have worried, but try telling that kind of thing to a mind that is
prone to worry. For a couple of days I thought this week’s Hereabouts would
have to be about the demise of Mimo, and it is indeed the case that one day
these accounts will have to do without another of the chickens—I think they’re
now all eight years old—but happily not this week. After a day of her refusing
to come out I moved a water bowl close so that she’d be comfortable on her
final journey. Next thing I knew, she was out and strolling about.
“What ho, Mimo,” I offered. “He’s not conceded yet.”
“He,” she averred, “has become an irrelevancy in the world of poultry.”
“Should I tell the press?”
Mimo, “What is a press and why does it need telling?”
I don’t think she would have made the best of presidents; possibly not the
worst either. Probably would have annoyed the French, having a chicken be
America’s head of state, they being so fond of roosters, but I imagine that
Canadians would have shown us how to be fine with it. Many of them are of
French origin of course.
Which brings me to la Victoire de la Grenouillère, a fight called in
English “the battle of Seven Oaks.” You get to that by investigating the
history of John McLoughlin, who is known as a historic Scottish person
hereabouts. When my father was introduced to the story his immediate reaction,
as one who grew up in Glasgow, was “Irish name.” Scottish, Irish, Canadian,
American, McLoughlin worked at a fur trade post for the North West Company,
which had a fierce rivalry with the Hudson Bay Company, a rivalry that
sometimes became physical. The Battle of Seven Oaks was an example of this
coming to blows. Should you be tempted to look it up you’ll find that the
illustration on Wikipedia has neither oaks nor frogs in it, grenouille being
French for frog. But here’s where the tale becomes complicated. Wikipedia
translates Grenouillère as “frog plain,” which is reasonable given the
expectation that fights often take place on plains, darkling and otherwise.
But the most famous grenouillère is a painting by Pierre-August Renoir. It
shows a tiny island and a floating restaurant named…La Grenouillère. Out of
the picture is the Île de la Grenouillère, froggy island of some kind. (The
actual island in the painting was called “camembert.”) Monet also made a
painting called la Grenouillère. If you want yet more confusion—and it does
seem to go rather well with our present political moment, does it not—online
dictionaries translate grenouillère as “one piece sleep suit.” I’m thinking
John McGloughlin was probably not involved in the battle of the one piece sleep
suit... or the battle of an impressionist painting. I’m betting that a pond
somewhere close to the battleground, or a swamp, was what gave the fight its
name.
Or a plain.
Moving to cats and rats. Sonsie now has a Viking name, "Sonsie
Ratkiller.” Earlier in the week he pulled his wrestling move—at least this is
what I imagine--and land on top of a rodent, paws akimbo. L and I were
enjoying an evening Zoom presentation about the plague, smallpox variolation
and imperial wars of the eighteenth century. As one does. Towards the finish
L. noticed in her peripheral vision Sonsie eating the top half of a rat. The
presenter was explaining that over the past twenty years our view of plague
transmission has changed and thus a wall in southern France, built to contain
plague in Marseilles, was not as bigly daft as it sounds. Apparently rats are
not the only way plague is transmitted, and preventing human movement from here
to there actually helped. And on our doorstep, here’s the Maine Coon bringing
us a visual aid.
He only finished half, but the following morning there was but a spine
and a tail; we know not who devoured the rest. It changes your perspective of
the world when you lie down for a nap, the knowledge that you are sharing the
couch with an apex killer/ wrestler.
Mimo is still slow to get out of bed in the morning, and definitely at
the bottom of the pecking order, but she’s currently wandering our domain like
Eddie Izzard’s version of the Queen.
I was first introduced to the fast-unto-death at age fifteen when I
met Lanza del Vasto, who was trying the tactic as a response to the French
government’s decision to create a military training ground in the Larzac. He
stopped after fifteen days. In 1963 he’d gone forty days when in Rome, to try
to get the Pope to take a position against war.
I do like his full name: Giuseppe Giovanni Luigi Enrico Lanza di
Trabia-Branciforte. Trips off the tongue, so I tried it as a conversational
gambit. I have the impression the chickens found the name interesting but no
conversation ensued. In fasting as in naming and chatting, de gustibus non est
disputandum.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
