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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
July 1, 2007
Published as Family History
in a Gramma Letter dated July 1, 1997.
© 1997 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Hens, 1979
© 1979 by Bud Grossmann
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TERRITORIAL DISPUTES
Tuesday, July 1, 1997
Dear Gramma,
Last week a mother bird attacked a schoolboy outside his summer school classroom; he sustained mynah injuries. Our dog Chester and I had gone to school on that day to escort Elizabeth home after her reading and math classes. We arrived just in time to witness the clash between bird and boy.
A fledgling mynah, on the ground and surrounded by students, frantically eluded the children’s grasping hands and called out to his mother for help. The mama mynah, fluttering about in the lower branches of a Golden tree, repeatedly squawked a warning to the children and then made good on her threat. With a sudden power dive, she struck a cruel blow against a tallish, blonde, fourth grade boy. Blood oozed from a wound just above his ear. The other children sprinted for the sanctuary of a classroom, while the baby bird scrunched low to make himself invisible in the dirt beneath a bush.
Chester and I examined the boy’s injury and went with him to the school nurse. No arrests were made, but a male teacher, with his head turbanned in a t-shirt, scooped the fledgling into a cardboard box and placed him in protective custody.
What saved my Elizabeth from a hole in the head that day—I am willing to speculate—was slow writing. If she hadn’t been at her desk after the dismissal bell, laboriously copying her homework assignment from the board, she probably would have been leading the pack in pursuit of the baby bird. She does love animals!
As Liz closed up her book bag and took Chester’s leash in hand to begin the short walk home, I described to her the little bit of excitement she had missed. Of course, I embellished the story, putting words into the mouth of the mother bird and claiming she “sent the boy tumbling to the ground in agony!” Eliz is used to my lies; she takes most of what I say with a pinch of salt.
Between the school and our house is a field, several acres I’d guess—large enough for two softball games and some kite-flying all at once. The previous day, big mowers had cut two weeks’ growth of grass, and it lay drying in windrows. Eliz and Chester sprinted out ahead of me and dove into the clumps of soft hay. As they frolicked, I began thinking of some of the animals and near-misses I’d experienced myself.
There have been geese that goosed, hard enough to hurt. Fish fins that have flashed through flesh. I’ve known sharp-toothed dogs, quick-clawed cats, and a garter snake someone mistakenly identified as “harmless.” I have marveled at the agility and speed of a snapping turtle on your Wisconsin farm and have had my butt battered by a bronco in Wyoming. I’ve been badly bumped by Old Pete, Grampa’s Suffolk sheep. Pete, without provocation, would sometimes fold back his ears, open wide his bloodshot eyes, and mutter a menacing “maa-aaah!” Once I turned to see him charging me and escaped into a maple tree with an adrenalin-assisted leap that was never matched again.
As frightening as Old Pete, though, was the beak of a setting Leghorn hen. When I was twelve or thirteen, you and Gramp were sending eggs to the hatchery. You ineffectually scolded me time and again for my reluctance to retrieve eggs from beneath those hens intent on motherhood. I had seen the lethal damage the big white chickens sometimes did to one another, and I didn’t want to find myself at the bottom of their pecking order. So I gathered eggs that weren’t guarded and left the rest for you. I apologize for my cowardice those many years ago, Gramma. And I’m sorry, too, if you think I look silly now, wearing a helmet when I walk to Elizabeth’s school.
Love,
Buddy
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