“I say we get some chickens if we want to eat decently.”  My room mate,  Brendon, was always coming up with schemes to improve our meagre dietary existence.  As University Students that were self funded, we had little enough money for books, not alone a decent feed now and then.

“Right you are and I can only think of a three things to impede that plan, wonderful as it is.”

“And what would they be?” he queried.

“First, live chickens cost a lot of money.  We can’t even afford the dead ones from the supermarket freezer chest.  Second, if we did have chickens, we have no where to keep them.  Third, we can barely feed ourselves, not alone feed chickens.”

“All of those defeatist arguments are invalid!  We only need one chicken.  We can afford a dozen impregnated eggs.  They sell for about ninety cents at the weekly market.  The chicken sits on the eggs until they hatch.  We sell half of the new chicks and get all of our money back.  The rest can live off of scraps and bugs from the rear yard.  I’ll keep them in my car boot when they aren’t roaming the yard.”

It actually sounded plausible.  Maybe he wasn’t entirely mad.  At least it was better than his plan to rustle a cow had been.  But there was a hitch.

“How many of the eggs will be hens and how many will be roosters?  The neighbours may put up with a bit of cluck, cluck, but the first time one crows, all hell will break loose.”

“There should be a fifty-fifty split and that’s OK!  We keep one roster to service the hens and eat the rest.”

“Ok, go for it.  But do not expect me to kill and dress the roosters.  That is your exclusive domain.”  I knew it would go no further so it was easier to give in and let him go off and create his own disappointment than it was to argue with such deficient logic.

That was six months ago.  What transpired had unimaginable consequences. 

Roommate managed to get his hands on a sad worn out hen that had stopped laying eggs and had been dumped and left to scavenge for itself at the local tip.  Someone just didn’t have the heart to kill the old dear and gave her freedom.  Brendan spotted her when he was doing odd job work for a yard maintenance firm.  It had been quite easy to catch her and toss her in the back seat of the utility truck he had driven to the green waste tip site.

Within a few days he had purchased the afore mentioned fertile eggs, but not from the farmers market.  He had run across an elderly woman that claimed to be descended from  pure Romanian Gypsy blood and could foretell the future.  She also had a small menagerie of animals at the rear of a shack that bordered on the tip.  She became the source of fertile chicken eggs. 

Not all at once.  A couple now and then was the most she could produce and half of those turned out to be duds. 

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