And the Weasel Strikes Again

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by Laura Parker Roerden

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We had an entire blessed week of quiet here on the weasel front. I no longer braced myself before I walked into the coop. We had stopped leaving the lights on all night. I had turned off the baby monitor. I had stopped walking the perimeter.

But this morning, after I fed the chickens, as an afterthought I looked behind the egg boxes and there it was: a headless aracauna chicken, a heritage breed from Chile. Aracaunas are among my favorite chickens. They are the ones that lay the bluish green eggs that look like paint chips or something you’d find in a fairy tale.

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Each aracuana hen is different. Some are speckled beige and black; others are reddish brown. This one that was the most recent kill was a heartbreakingly almost cerulean grey.

In that moment I wanted to be like Scarlett O’Hara and just close the door to the coop.

I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I went inside the farmhouse. I took a deep breath. I maybe cried a little. I sent a pressing work email out about a book project. And then once again got back to examining the crime scene with our handyman Keith. We found paint chips and dust disturbed around an area of chicken wire that might provide about an inch of opening: likely the place of entry. We closed more holes.

I went back to the hardware store.

“Do you think the fox pee will work?” I ask the man in the paint department, who no doubt knows me as the weasel lady. “There’s no coyote pee left.”

“The coyote urine had opened all over the floor,” the clerk explained patiently. “We had to dispense of it quickly. It leaves quite the stench.”

“Yes,” I nod knowingly.

When did this happen? When did I begin spending mornings discussing the merits of various dehydrated urines?

I purchase the fox urine, feeling slightly more like Scarlet vowing to rebuild Tara as I leave.

Afterall, tomorrow is another day.

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Published by Laura Parker Roerden

Laura Parker Roerden shares a love of what nature can teach us. Writer, public speaker and supportor of youth to boldly know and save the wilds. She is the founding director of Ocean Matters and a fourth generation farmer and thinks today’s young people are reason to be hopeful about the many environmental problems facing us. She lives on a family farm in Massachusetts with her husband, three boys, and an assortment of fruit trees and farm animals.

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