I heard a most horrifying and disturbing sound this morning. This is predicated on two distinct observations: (1) the mother hen I’ve been seeing around my place (the one that has been waking me up in the morning) had a brood of five chicks. Recently I’ve only been seeing four, and I’ve been wondering what happened to the fifth. (2) A neighborhood cat has been stalking my backyard.

The sound occurred fairly early. I was again awakened by the usual mother clucker and her cheep-cheeping offspring. They were making the rounds, and, in all fairness, I do kind of like waking to the sounds of them digging around and eating various pests, even when it’s still barely after sunrise. While they were still in the backyard, I could hear some commotion from the hen. A rustling of grass. A frantic flutter of wings. Clucking that became faster and faster as she must have been trying to collect her chicks around her. A moment or two of this frenzied chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck!, and then — a swift swishing of foliage, a burst of desperate cawing, and a piercing, awful, savage scream. A scream!  An actual, almost human-sounding scream. I was so startled by this noise having come out of a chicken that I quickly made my way over to the window. I knew there was another rival hen that had been harassing the mother, so I suspected maybe they had had a tussle. But pushing aside the curtains, the truth was far more vicious, if yet more expected. The same grey cat I had seen earlier was trotting off with a limp chick in its mouth. The mother hen still stood, crouched, with her wings spread over her remaining three, with a look of shock. Of hideous resignation. Of frozen disbelief. This was the scream of purest heartbreak. This was the scream of perfect agony. This was the voice given to a mother watching her child be eaten before her eyes.

It was hard for me after the fact, staring into that mother’s traumatized eyes, not to wonder whether she attained a moment of sudden awareness. Had she previously known, like all parents, that there would come a day when she could no longer protect her children? With the death of not one but two of her chicks, did her mind wither at finding that day had arrived? Did she feel a sense of hollow dread at her powerlessness against the will of the gods? If so, how did she imagine them? Did she see a vision of some vengeful insect gods, striking out at a fowl beast that had brought the destruction of countless locusts and grubs? Or did she see herself adrift in a godless world of unstoppable natural forces? Or did she find herself as the butt of a cosmic joke — a sudden piercing awareness of having been set here by a creator who saw fit to make her one of the basic foods — even to the point that when other organisms discussed between themselves the flavor of the muscular flesh of other creatures, they inevitably disappointedly conceded to themselves …”tastes like chicken” ?