LETTERS FROM AN OREGON RANCH
really had hatched seven chickens. But having hatched them, she apparently didn’t want them, or know what to do with them. She just stood in a far corner of the coop and eyed them gloomily, making no effort to feed, amuse, or instruct them. She evidently never told them a word about hawks, and the very first day they were allowed to go out for exercise two were carried off, and the next day another; the following morning she came straight to the house with the remaining four, threw them on my hands, walked off among the tall ferns, and never came back to them. The little dew-bedraggled things stood in a shivering huddle, peeping for their mother, until my nerves could no longer endure it. I brought them in, fed, and wrapped them up warmly; but still came those anxious cries, shrill and incessant. Then I remembered that Thoreau says, “Little chickens taken from the hen and put in a basket of cotton will often peep till they die; but if you will put in a book, or anything heavy, which will press down the cotton and feel like the hen, they will go to sleep directly.” Looking around for a weight that would “feel like the hen,” an inspiration seized me. I took a fluffy feather duster, warmed it slightly, and placed it over them, and was instantly rewarded by hearing a soft, gentle twittering,—“the low beginnings of content,” which soon ended in perfect quiet. In the hush that followed, I blessed the “Recluse of Walden” for the happy hint which had floated to me across the years.
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