Okay, I should go. But here's the beginning of my chicken story (I just wrote it all at once, doesn't have chapters yet or anything):
Ash, the Unusual Cockerel
Ash had lived at Five Forks Farm since he was born, and so had his mother, and her mother and father. His father had been brooded at a chick hatchery and had not been bred by the owners of the farm, like his maternal ancestors. However, that did not make him any less a welcome inhabitant of the farm; any chicken was welcome there as long as the human owners felt them worthy to stay. "Chicks," Ash's mother had said they were old enough to understand, "You are constantly in danger of being gotten rid of. The humans will pack you in tight metal cages with other chickens, and bring you somewhere awful. You will sit in the sun for hours, and some of you will be taken away by strange humans. Others will escape the dreadful fate."
"What fate?" a frightened chick might ask, cuddling ever closer to his mother's warm, brown breast.
"No one knows," she would whisper back. "But all too often, it is the less useful ones that are taken away. Mean, ugly, hens that can no longer lay eggs, or young cockerels that are simply one of many like them. Especially the cockerels. The humans tend to like the egglaying hens much better, while they simply do away with most of the roosters - they must think them a nuisance." She would turn her neck and cuddle the wide-eyed chicks, whom no one knew whether they were male or female, not even their mother. "Our caretakers are not cruel, my chicks, but they certainly have strange ways."
Ash, along with his other siblings, had carried the frightening thought of someday being taken away to the terrifying place their mother had described. "I've been there myself," she had told them gently. "The little brown-haired girl tried to make me understand it was a mistake, but I don't know whether or not she was telling the truth - or goodness me, whether I heard her correctly."
The chicks had grown rapidly. In only two weeks, they were getting feathered out. By four weeks they had ventured outside and were enjoying running in their ample pen in the fresh, green summer grass. In time, they were allowed complete freedom with no cage, and their mother left them soon after. But none of the chicks missed her. It was pure joy to be out alone, running and half-flying with their clean new feathers. They slept in the coop with the other chickens, and in the daytime they roamed freely about the farm. The farm's watchdog, an overgrown white poodle, did not bother them; instead he would clumsily chase anything away that he smelled, saw, or heard that might be bothering them. That was not to say he was the brightest bulb in the dog world. Ash and many other chickens suspected that he chased the predators for fun - not for the protection of the birds.
Ash's mother had taught he and his siblings about predators, how they struck without remorse, how they were bloodthirsty and eager to kill. She listed many possible threats. "Chicks," she would say, while preening a rumpled gray-brown wing, "You must always watch out for animals that might kill you. Raccoons are bloodthirsty bandits. They kill and devour with no mercy, leaving nothing on the spot. They are your worst predators. They can reach through the wire here"-- she gestured to the chain-link fence and chicken wire around them --"pulling you through the cage by your neck. They can climb trees, crawl on the ground. They cannot be stopped.
"Possums and snakes will eat eggs, possums breaking them open and snakes devouring them whole. Snakes occasionally eat chicks like you, when they can get them. Dogs and foxes will chase and catch you, sinking their teeth into your flesh. Living is only possible if the animal has not hurt you lethally, and even then our humans must get you back from the dog and care for you intensively. They are dangerous animals, dogs, all but our fluffy white one here.
"Hawks, last but not least, come from the air. They swoop without warning and kill you with their sharp claws. Their only match in evil is the raccoon. They are both lethal characters, killing without mercy. Whatever you do, stay away from them. Never, however, be rude to crows. They are hated by every type of farmer except chicken farmers, as they hate hawks as much as we do and will chase them off angrily."
Ash grew quickly, nearly the height of his father. He had strong brown wings and a thickly feathered, speckled breast, with long, gangly pink legs.
And there I stopped writing. I hope to write more, though!
