Fourth Form of Madness

When I was about 12, our family  got chooks.  They were beautiful black hens with scarlet speckles around their necks.  I used to love to watch them pecking around their pen, stirring up the dirty with their forever scratching feet.  My brother and I would sometimes play a game of releasing all the girls (as they were affectionately known) out into their larger pen and then see who could round the most up into their smaller sleeping quarters.  Sometimes they would burst loose from their confines altogether and roam our larger mid-surban backyard eating all the parsley and assorted vegetable garden goodies they could find before being returned to their chookie prison behind mesh wire.

They were all magnificent creatures, but by far the chook that stole all our hearts the most, and was also the consistently best egg layer, was Moses.  Named by father for reasons only known to him, I’m guessing biblical flashback, Moses was by far the most splendid girl amongst them.  With graces that can only  be bestowed by the gods, Moses ruled that chook pen with the cold, steel, beady eye of a most convincing and appropriate Matriarch.   Nothing went on under her watch without her say so.  And that was why I was so surprised when a certain turn of events happened one hot mid summer days in the mist of school holidays.

It was like any other day, as I meandered my way down the back yard, being careful to stick to the shade, the shadow, out of the blazing mid day sun.  I was going to check on the girl’s water levels and collect any eggs that may have been laid already for the day.  There had been a lot of noise from the pen earlier and I felt confident that there would be a bounty of eggs to collect. Instead a rather gruesome discovery lay ahead of me.

There amongst the dust of the scratching feet of the girls, lay a fallen hen who was missing many feathers and was looking feeble and unwell.  Instead of the other girls showing any signs of concern or offering any form of assistance, they instead were taking turns at pecking maliciously at the fallen hen with aims so true and strong that it make me flinch each time a beak struck her.  And there was Moses, off happily pecking up random grain that had been flung the furtherest from the early morning feed.  Off taking care of her business the best she could whilst the others settled a civil unrest in true might is right style.

I was childishly and idealistically appalled.  How could this happen on her watch, how could she let the whole group peck to death a stricken hen,whilst merrily feeding in the corner, her refusal to engage or even acknowledge  the vile scene condoning her support of what was happening.  And it was then that I saw it, her powerlessness in the face of group action.  Moses only had status, power, dependent on the approval of the group of girls she led, without that she was just any other speckled neck hen with a slightly better than average egg laying ability trying to get by along with the rest of the brood.  In the mist of that blistering summer’sday, a chill overtook my being.

Recovering from my initial shock, I quickly rushed the group of blood hungry pecking machines and did my best to shelter the fallen hen from them.  The mauled and mutilated hen survived the ordeal but my trust in groups did not.  Group dynamics, to this day remains one of my biggest fears and I give it all the respect it deserves.  This is an ill defined,  often poorly understood leviathan that does not care for the rules of rhyme nor reason but seemingly has rote learnt all the words in the songbook of dogma. This makes it a most menacing foe indeed.   A foe that you can never entirely be certain that you are not, in some way, forming a silent alliance with, somewhere in some far off corner of your own life.