A Tiny Yellow Beak

A sorry-looking chicken is hobbling on one leg between a palm tree and an aloe plant in my backyard. I’ve seen it three mornings this week. Yesterday, it walked right up to me like a dog wanting to be patted on the head. Just as I made a “come here” sound with my lips, lowering my hand, my cat raced down the stairs and chased the chicken into the bushes.

“Dad, don’t let Boots kill the chicken!” One of my daughters stood looking on with her hands pressed tight against her cheeks.

I crouched into the bushes after the cat. His belly flattened against the soil. His hind legs coiled. When I reached for his tail, his stalking posture relaxed, stomach lifting, feet slowing in place. Instead of swiping at the bird’s rubbery neck, he moved closer to it, but with no threat in it.

“What’s he doing, Dad?”

Boots stretched his front legs against the trunk of the palm tree, scratching wildly back and forth on the bark.

I leaned in for his tail again. He sidestepped my hand, paused, then stepped even closer to the chicken, lowering his head onto a pile of dead coconut fronds.

“Dad!”

Ducking under the teeth of the aloe, my knees in the dirt, I got eye level with them. Boots sniffed at the fronds. The chicken hopped frantically on one leg. In two minds.

“What is it, boy?” I whispered.

Out of a small opening in the pile of leaves, a tiny yellow beak emerged, and then a faint, fragile chirp. Boots meowed. The chicken hammered the ground with its beak. I hovered my hands around my cat just in case, but eager see it play out. Boots circled the leaves, rubbing his head against the pile, and then, with one great look of satisfaction, as though he’d just killed a flock of migratory birds, he scampered out of the bushes and back into the house.

“Can we keep them?” my daughter said, peering over my shoulder.