The Turkeys We Walked Home

Junie’s Hen

There is always one bird that cannot keep up.

That morning it was a little hen, the smallest in the flock. She had come in late as a poult, a few days behind the others, and she had never quite caught up. She was maybe fifteen pounds, and she had a stiff way of walking on her left leg.

By the time we came up out of the ditch onto my drive, she was falling behind. She would walk ten steps and sit. I would come up beside her and she would get up and walk ten more, and sit again.

About a hundred yards from the gate, she sat down and would not get up.

The flock was already flowing up the drive. Pax and Junie were at the gate with their sticks out, and the leaders were turning in, just like I had hoped. I did not want to leave the flock to deal with one hen, and I did not want to leave the hen.

Then Junie came down the drive toward me. She had left Pax to handle the gate alone, which she was not supposed to do, but she had seen.

“I’ll get her,” she said.

“Honey, she’s heavy.”

“I can do it.”

She squatted down the way I have shown her, with one arm under the hen’s breast and one around her wings so she could not flap, and stood up. That hen weighed nearly twice what our cat does. Junie’s face went red. Her knees wobbled.

But the hen just settled against her like she had been waiting all morning for someone to ask.

Junie walked. She took about twenty steps and stopped and shifted the bird and took twenty more. I walked beside her with my stick out, in case she needed me, and I did not say a word, because I knew she did not want help.

“She needs a name,” Junie said, puffing.

“What do you want to call her?”

Junie thought about it for about ten steps. “Halvard,” she said. “Because he stopped the road.” I laughed so hard I had to stop walking. “Junie, that’s a man’s name. She’s a girl.”

“I know,” Junie said, completely serious. “She doesn’t care.”

She carried Halvard the hen the whole last hundred yards, and through the gate, and set her down inside the fence next to the waterer. Then she sat right down in the dirt beside her, breathing hard, and put her mitten on the hen’s back.

I had to go stand behind the barn for a minute.