Add a chicken in a cherry tree!
Life Sketches by Terry Berkson

Late one afternoon several Christmases ago at the height of a driving snowstorm, I left my typewriter and looked out the kitchen window. There was a large bird roosting in our cherry tree. It wasn’t a crow or a pigeon or a morning dove. I knew those Brooklyn birds well. This was something much bigger.
The tree stood at the back of the yard against the fence, which was about fifty feet from the house. With the failing light and blowing snow, it was difficult to make out just what kind of bird it was. I didn’t have binoculars, but someone had once left a pair of pearl-covered opera glasses in my father’s taxi, and with those I could make out that the big bird in the tree looked like a chicken, one with those dark black and gray feathers.

My pregnant wife hadn’t talked to me for two days. Something I said or did had aroused her temper. It looked like it was going to be a heavy Christmas. I called, “Hey Alice, there’s a chicken in our cherry tree!”

“Yeah, sure,” she said from the next room. “And a partridge in our pear.”

She shuffled in and grabbed the opera glasses. I wondered how a chicken could wind up in our backyard on a winter day. It was about 18 degrees out and the wind was blowing so hard that the bird was clinging to the branch like a flag. I pictured the poor thing’s bare feet wrapped around the icy limb. Alice was also feeling sorry for the intruder, but what could I do? I assured her that the bird was equipped for this kind of weather. After all, prairie chickens didn’t live in coops.

We remained at the frost-framed window for a long time, sipping hot tea, my peace offering, as Christmas carols rang from the stereo. Alice’s anger seemed to be softening.

But, about an hour later, I found myself wading through a deep snowdrift heading for the tree as my wife, then in her ninth month, goaded me on from the window. I was carrying one of those long bamboo poles that rugs used to be rolled around.

Everyone knows that chickens don’t fly, so, I thought if I scared the bird out of the tree it would land on the ground, where I’d catch it and put it down in the warm cellar. But, when I poked the pole into the tree the chicken clucked a few times and then took off, wings pumping hard, soaring, rising over the icy clotheslines, the telephone pole and then the flat roofs of the houses in back of ours.

“That couldn’t have been a chicken!” I called to my wife.

“Nice going. You let it get away,” she said.

The next day the bird was back, and in the daylight I could see that it was definitely a chicken. How long could it survive in weather like this? It had stopped snowing, but the wind was still strong and the temperature hadn’t risen above 25. With the snow covering the ground, it would be impossible for the bird to find something to eat. The only way I was going to catch this homeless critter was by winning its confidence.

At Alice’s strong suggestion, I took a long, cold walk to the live-poultry market down at the end of West Sixth Street. When I told the old man in the store about the chicken flying over the houses, he said I had been drinking too much eggnog. He told me to describe the chicken, which he later called a Plymouth Rock; it was probably a female.

“But they can’t do that,” he said. “You’re crazy!”

I told him to just sell me a pound of chicken feed and I’d be on my way.

When I got home I spread some of the feed underneath the cherry tree. Most of it was taken by the wind or sank into the soft snow. The bird didn’t come down to eat any corn that first day or the next, but on the third day the weather grew a lot warmer and the sun burned holes in the blown hollows and drifts so that patches of brown and green appeared in the backyard. Again I spread the feed and this time after a couple of hours I left my work and looked out the window to see the chicken pecking around in the bare spots.

For the next several mild days, the bird roosted in the tree and fed on the ground. The weatherman had predicted a drop in temperature and more snow towards the end of the week. It was doubtful the chicken would survive another extended cold snap. I didn’t have much time to capture her and put her in a crate to make my wife happy.

The bird was growing less shy. When I’d walk out into the yard to spread the feed, she would only flee to the top of the fence and not to the tree. Sometimes she would doze there or sidle along the fence into the next yard in back of an apartment house. I figured in a couple of days she’d be tame enough to get my fishing net over her.

“You better make your move soon before the weather turns,” my wife warned.

Late that night as Alice slept, I heard a terrible commotion coming from in back of the apartment house next door. There was shouting and clucking and cawing and I could hear wings flapping. Then there was the drum roll of what sounded like a large paper bag being opened and I heard scratching. I ran out the back door to the fence to see what was going on.

“Who’s there?” I called. There was some muffled talk. “What’s going on?” I shouted. There was more rustling of paper and then crunching footsteps running down the alley.

In the morning when I went out with the bag of feed the chicken wasn’t on the fence or in the tree or on one of the flat-roofed houses. I figured they had captured her the night before while she was sleeping on top of the fence.

“At least you won’t have to worry about that chicken anymore,” I later told Alice as we looked out the window.

She seemed relieved. But for all we knew, the chicken was already in somebody’s pot. We kept wondering where she had come from and who was behind the fence the night before.

“Well, you tried,” my wife said putting her arms around me. It was now Christmas Eve. We would be trimming the tree after all. Snow was beginning to cover the burned-off patches in the backyard. Nat King Cole drifted out of the stereo. I was still puzzled about the chicken soaring over the rooftops when I first tried to catch it.

“I wonder how it was possible,” I said to Alice. “Chickens aren’t supposed to fly.”

She backed away from the window and playfully chucked me under the chin. “Neither are reindeer!”