A fox took my hens last month. “All my pretty chickens … at one fell swoop,” as Macduff says in Macbeth, though, of course, Macduff is talking about his actual children, not bantams. They were very pretty indeed, though, my girls.
Weeks later, I’m still finding feathers. I cleared the bulk of the colourful ones the next day with a leaden heart: five piles marking the demise of each of my five beloveds. The tiny speckled gang-leader girls, Eris and Faustina, glossy goth-black Josephine, broody, petrol-iridescent Stella and stoic beige-bearded Daphne, the flock sentry, usually alert to any threat. Was she caught off guard on a balmy early evening, distracted by a worm, or a scrap with a magpie? I try to stop speculating, imagining, blaming myself for going out, for not keeping them safe. But their downy, impossibly soft under-feathers have lingered: I find them snagged on bushes, tumbling across the straw-dry grass, gathering in small drifts on the bristles of the doormat. They keep ambushing me.
