Scottish Field’s online columnist Brash McKelvie has found some unexpected new arrivals in the woodshed.
Here are the cast of characters that share the vicissitudes of life:
Scragend – a Rhode Island Red of indeterminate age and foul nature.
Shitting Cat – does exactly what it says on the tin.
The Beloved – a paragon of virtue and a self-appointed critic of most of my thoughts and actions.
Snr and Jnr Orifice – our fledged offspring.
Motherhood, that unspoken bond, the dewy eyed, patient selflessness of it all – most oft portrayed as that silken nursing period twixt offspring and the mama.
Not round my gaff it isn’t.
With the advent of buds budding and a slight lift in the light I have been endeavouring to make the shed ‘spring ready’ (having given up on doing the same for myself many millennia back) and I was at the final push… moving the vast old wooden kist which was set back deep into the bowels of the shed and which has been there since Adam was a lad.
Having served its purpose it was time to turn it out, make space – perhaps for a chaise longue, a wicker bath chair, a small bar? – the possibilities were endless.
Whilst I was trying to shift the damn thing Scragend appeared with her very early hatched brood – moronically idiotic to a chick, red feathered and clueless, the Trumptons as they have been christened by the family were left on the shed floor as she took roost on the tool shelf, overseeing my whole back breaking operation.
So it was she that spotted the rat’s nest first. Now let me honest about this. Rats are not a favourite of mine, I do not see them as; ‘Aawww…. fur babies, smiley emoticon, let’s dress them in sailor suits’ material. They are vermin.
But I do draw the line at hurting a female nursing anything and that includes rats. This rat in particular. For this was a nest full of rat kits and a very protective mother – all wedged between the shed wall and this vast kist.
So, as quick as my slipping discs would allow, I started to push the kist back to return the young rats and Mama to the peace of their nursery.
Scragend, who over the years had not evinced a scrap of maternal behaviour, saw this as a direct threat to her brood and went entirely ninja nuclear. Squawking and flapping she tumbled down from the shelf, raining tools upon the heads of her insane offspring in the process, landed on the kist and tried her level best to get down to the rat.
Meanwhile the Trumptons trotted aimlessly back and forwards from one side of the shed to the other like a troop of dishevelled wind up toys.
One last push and the kist was back, all was quiet, order restored – no need for a bar or a chaise longue in the shed anyway. But that Pol Pot of Poultry was still vibrating with indignant rage… so when Shitting Cat stuck her head round the shed door to see what was ado, she received the full force of Scragend’s new found maternal fury and was last seen galloping due north hotly pursued by the raging Rhode Island Red.
Motherhood – it is a beautiful thing.
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