“We’ll break her up,” Mom said. “We can’t have her hatching a nest of chickens up there.”
“Couldn’t we make her a nest down here, out by the grape arbor? Couldn’t we put her in the new coop Pop and I made?”
“Better break her up,” Mom said, “she’s one of our best laying hens and if we set her, she’ll be busy all summer raising her family, and not an egg will we get.”
“But we break her up every year, and she never has a family of her own,” I said. “I think she’d look awfully proud and pretty strutting around the barnyard with a whole flock of little white chickens following her,”—which is one of the prettiest sights a boy ever sees on a farm—a mother hen with a whole flock of fuzzy-wuzzy little chickens behind and beside and in front of her, and running quick whenever she clucks for them to come and they all gather around her and eat the different things which she finds for them, such as small bugs, pieces of barnyard food, small grains of this or that and just plain stuff.
“Well, maybe you’re right,” Mom said, all of a sudden, “let’s set her. First, let’s get her nest ready and select fifteen of the nicest leghorn eggs we can find and have them all ready for her; then you go get her and bring her down.”
“She won’t want to leave her nice warm nest up in the haymow,” I said to Mom, looking up at her kinda pretty, warmish summer face under its blue sunbonnet.
“No, she won’t,” Mom said back to me, “But she’ll do it if we work it right. Hens are very particular about moving from one nest to another. We’ll maybe have to shut her up in the coop.”
Well, it was one of the most interesting things I liked to do around the farm. First, we took a nice brand new chicken coop which was just about as high as halfway between my knees and my belt, then we scooped a foot-in-diameter roundish hole in the ground close to our grape arbor, making the hole about only a few inches deep. We lined it with nice clean straw and then selected fifteen of the prettiest, cleanest white eggs we could find which had been laid that very day by the different leghorn other hens on our farm, and which would probably be what were called “fertile eggs” and would hatch. Then I ran lickety-sizzle as fast as I could to our barn, scooted up the ladder into our haymow, and in spite of Old Bentcomb’s being very angry and not wanting to leave her nest, I got her under one arm and brought her down the ladder.
In less than a jiffy or two, I was with her up to where Mom and I were going to coop her up in the coop. I stooped down first and looked into the dark inside of the coop and there was the prettiest, nicest most beautiful fifteen eggs you ever saw all side by each. The coop had a roof on it but no floor, the floor being the ground with the straw nest in it. I pushed Bentcomb very gently and in a friendly way up to the hole in the front of the coop, and let her look in at the nest full of eggs. She had been clucking like everything and whining and complaining in a saddish sort of voice which meant she wanted to be a mother of a whole flock of little chickens, but say! She was mad at me and didn’t want to go in. She kept turning away from the hole in the coop not even looking at the nice new nest. So I said to her, “O.K., Old Bentcomb, I’ll take you out and show you what will happen to you if you don’t sit on those eggs.”
I took her in my two hands, holding her tight so she wouldn’t squirm loose and get away, and walked with her to our chicken house and around behind it to where there was a peach tree under which we had a pen with chickenyard wire all around and on top. Inside were about nine or a dozen of our best laying hens who had wanted to set, but whom we decided to “break up” instead of letting them have their stubborn hen-ways and “set.” There they were, all shut up by themselves. Some of them were walking around with their wings all spread out, and clucking like they wanted a bunch of little chickens to come and crawl under them, and they were cluck-cluck-clucking in a saddish whining tone of voice. Over in one corner was a white egg which meant that one of the hens had already given up wanting to “set” and was behaving herself again like a good laying hen. And I thought that as soon as we could decide which one of the hens it was, we’d take her out and let her have her liberty again.