The Chicken Wagon

Daddy was really mad this time. He snatched the hatchet from my hand and informed me that what I was about to do wouldn’t work and would cause the chicken a lot of distress.

So I temporarily gave up the idea of flying.

TOMMY AND THE GOAT CART
The second story I remember Mo reading to me was “The Goat Boy of Holland.” The poor little Dutch boy couldn’t walk, but he had a goat. His dad would tie the goat to the little boy’s cart, and the little boy could travel all over the village.

Wow! Another great idea! Goats were useful modes of transportation. That’s all information I needed. I could walk just fine, but why walk if I could ride? I already had a little red wagon, which is as good as a cart. All I needed was a goat.

Our family is German, and Germans are pragmatists. We ran a dairy cow farm, and goats were unnecessary to the farm operation. Daddy informed me there would be no goat. Period. When Daddy made a decision, it was final.

I was sitting on the porch steps deep in thought, and a bit miffed at the poor response I got for my goat request. That’s when Tommy walked by. Tommy was our long-legged beagle hound and probably the best rabbit dog in the country. I guess we called him “long- legged” because his legs were longer than the short-legged beagle kind.

Tommy could find the rabbit and then chase it back to you. Sometimes the rabbit would run half a mile in the wrong direction, but Tommy could eventually bring it back within shotgun range.

It struck me that Tommy was also about the size of a small goat and just maybe the size needed to pull my wagon. Tommy was docile and would do whatever you needed done. That is, if it dealt with rabbit hunting.

But as a draft animal, Tommy was uncooperative. I found some bailer twine—easy, since it was all over the place—and cut a
piece for the job. I tied one end to the wagon and the other end to Tommy’s leather collar. Then I sat back in the wagon anticipating a great ride.

But Tommy just stood there, and I just sat there. Nothing was happening.

That’s where sticks come in handy. I found a nice long stick, sat back in the wagon, and whacked Tommy on the back. Nothing. He just looked back at me, as if asking, “Why?”

A five-year-old isn’t very good at whacking, and my efforts lacked the strength and resolve needed to get the job done. A few whacks later, Tommy lay down in front of the wagon and didn’t move. He simply didn’t understand his new role in life.

Maybe Tommy wasn’t big enough. A bigger animal could more easily pull me around.

THE HEIFER AND THE GOAT CART
That’s when I noticed some heifers milling around the barnyard. If you’ve studied the old farm photo, you can see we had a nice cow path from the barnyard to the watering trough, about fifty yards distance. That could be my test area for heifers. They certainly had the strength to pull me.

I had seen a lot of lassoing in cowboy movies, and it looked easy. You just threw a lasso around the cow’s neck and stopped it dead in its tracks.

To get a heifer to pull me, I’d have to lasso it first.

I found a longer piece of bailer twine (more where that came from) and made a lasso. It wasn’t much of a lasso because all I knew how to make was a slipknot. But it worked. I walked up to a heifer, threw the lasso over its head—this took about fifty attempts—and tied the other end of the rope to my wagon.

It wasn’t working. That heifer just stood there, same as Tommy did.

Maybe it needed some persuasion. I leaned out of my wagon and picked up a rock. The heifer was pointed in the right direction—the lane to the watering trough. This should be a really good ride!

When animals are startled by something, say a rock hitting them in the rump, they don’t behave as one might think. No, they just run. That heifer took a jump off the starting line and headed for someplace safer. The heifer was running fast, and there was a lot of bailer twine between her and my wagon.

This is where an explanation of “momentum and inertia” would be useful. I didn’t understand Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of physics at the time, but this law applied to me. When the slack was taken up, the wagon simply went out from under me. I saw earth/sky, earth/sky, earth/sky within the one-second trip to the ground.

As I lay there in the dust listening to my wagon bouncing along the cow path, I saw legs walking by. Chicken legs.

I already told you I was unafraid of chickens. And as you know, Daddy had a year earlier killed the only rooster capable of defending them that day.

THE CHICKEN TEAM
Mother had a box of 20 Mule Team Borax™ laundry soap that illustrated a big wagon pulled by a team of twenty mules. I thought about the mules and the wagon, and a thought came to me: Dogs are too small and uncooperative, heifers too big, chickens are too weak— but what about a team of chickens? A big team.

It took me almost an hour to retrieve my wagon because that stupid heifer kept getting spooked by the sounds of the wagon behind her. Every time I got close, she moved, the wagon moved, and off she’d run again. A couple of times I got tempted to get back in the wagon, but I was still hurting from the first time.

Finally she got thirsty and headed for the watering trough. While she drank, I was able to get the wagon untied. The lasso was still around her neck, but that would have to wait. I can’t remember ever getting around to removing the lasso, but maybe it just wore off sometime that summer. Or more likely Daddy found a heifer with twine around her neck and freed her. But I can’t remember him mentioning it to me.

Okay, back to the current episode of putting together a team of chickens to pull my wagon. I would need to catch a dozen or more.
As you remember, my capture method was making little corn trails leading to me. When the chicken pecked its way to me, I grabbed it and tied it to a fence post with bailer twine. (Lots more where that came from.) When I caught a dozen, I figured I would have enough.

It took me forever to catch a dozen chickens. They’re probably the dumbest creatures on earth, but it seemed they were watching their sisters getting captured one by one and deduced that the corn trails led to disaster.

When I finally had my twelfth chicken, I tied all the chicken twines to my wagon and got in. They were standing around looking disorganized—even worse than Tommy. That’s when the beating began. I had a small tree branch to make them all run in the same direction, so when they ran left or right, I simply corrected their path.

Chickens are not only dumb, but they can’t get their act together. It didn’t matter how hard I brought down the branch on the right or the left, they still ran to the right or left. I can’t remember any running to the front. Totally disorganized! And I wasn’t moving an inch.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to tie very good knots. The only knot I knew, remember, was the slipknot, which didn’t bode well for the chickens. As the chickens tried to escape, the twine got tighter and tighter until I noticed that they were simply lying around, unmindful of the branch.

By that time, the squawks and commotion had awakened Daddy from his afternoon nap. He stepped out onto the porch, rubbing his eyes in disbelief.

“What the Sam Hill? Chickens! Georgie!” Daddy was madder than he was when he stopped me from dewinging the hen. But he didn’t have time for a lecture on the impossibility of making chickens pull my wagon. There was work to be done.

I sat there in the wagon, fascinated with the new drama at hand. Daddy had big, strong hands but not totally adept at freeing chickens. It was interesting watching him try to pry those big fingers between chicken necks and twine, attempting to untie the little slipknots to save his chickens from strangling.

As I recall, we had chicken for Sunday’s dinner. Daddy didn’t look like he enjoyed it much, though.

“The Chicken Wagon” song: https://soundcloud.com/teatimewithgeorge/the-chicken-team