Sedona has a friend.  Dudley the Beagle belongs to our neighbors to the south, the people who own Oak Creek Winery.  (I know, perfect neighbors for us.)  Their property had also once been owned by Sam Frey and, like ours, is one of the original ranches on the spring.  When they bought the house they had in mind to grown medical Marijuana but the opportunity to do that fell by the wayside here in Arizona.  Since then their exterior remodeling has the look of a potential B&B to it.

Anyway, Dudley free ranges and in his travels he stops by to make Sedona crazy.  How, you might ask?  Simply by running.  That dog is amazingly fast.  He quite literally runs circles around my Australian Shepherd pup.  She ends up howling at him to “Please slow down so I can catch you!”  (This is important for the forthcoming story.)

So the other day I took Sedona to her first vet visit.  It was time to get legal.  The Rabies vaccine.  A license.  Things cat owners don’t usually worry about.   Our new vet is close, just down at the end of the road.  And nice, or so Sedona believes.  Then again, she was convinced that all four people in the office (two owners, one tech/receptionist and the vet)  had all come to this new place to see HER!  How amazing is that?  She wiggled and smiled and tried to jump and wiggled some more.  (One thing I really like about her is that she doesn’t pee when she gets excited, thank heavens.)  She even smiled as she got her shot, then wiggled some more at an old and sick Shih Tzu while I arranged for her spay as well as the neutering of Billy and Burtie last Friday.

Meanwhile back at the ranch Dudley had appeared, looking for Sedona.  Instead, he found chickens.  I’d left the orchard gate open for the girls to do their own free ranging, which that day included the first three ladies getting into my artichokes again.  Some of other flock had followed them out to scratch away near the barn.  That’s where Dudley found them and being a Beagle he did what Beagles were bred to do–he chased down and took his prey.

(A note:  this is Ed’s tale, not mine.  I’m so sorry I missed this.)

At that moment Ed was installing plastic on the greenhouse which is above the field.  (This is so appropriate.)  Upon hearing Dudley barking and much excited squawking, he starts down the narrow stair to the lower field in time to see Dudley heading home with one of the Australorpes in his mouth.   “Hey, dog! Let her go!  Stop!  Come!” he says he shouted (although I’m guessing there might have been a few bluer words in those commands), as he reaches the equally narrow bridge that crosses the Ditch and leads to the field.

Dudley, burdened by a limp chicken in his mouth, is moving slower than usual, a fact for which Ed is grateful.  My husband sprints across the field, leaping over the makeshift irrigation ditches we dug into the sod this summer and avoiding the numerous gopher mounds that dot our landscape.

How it went down

Dudley isn’t giving way.   He’s caught that chicken and, by George, he’s keeping it.  (Only a beagle named Dudley would say “by George”.)  Running faster than a man his age ever thought he could (Ed’s description), Ed charts a diagonal course across the field, and, catches the dog just before Dudley hits the big Sycamore.  Rather than let Ed catch him Dudley spits out both chicken and feathers, and hightails it home.  (We haven’t seen him in a few days. Any dog who would say “by George” knows when to lay low.)

The newly freed hen staggers around in a circle then falls into the irrigation ditch.  Ed says he followed her as she stumbled up its length until she reached the rocky hollow below the irrigation value where she promptly inserted her head into a gap in the rocks.  At this point she collapsed, butt out to the world.

Figuring she’s done for, Ed lets her be as he chases the other ten birds back into orchard.  Once they’re safe behind the closed gate he returns for their fallen sister.  Figuring on blood he says he hesitated before picking her up.  To his surprise once he lifted her she looked up at him, eyes still rotating in her head I’m sure, but very much alive.

“Hmm, not too bad,” Ed says he told her.  Carrying her back to the orchard fence, he set her down to open the gate.  She looked up at him,  cocking her head one way than the other, then strode into the chicken Green Zone on her own power.

Inside, all the other girls were no doubt discussing as only hens can how dangerous it was to leave the protection of their fence.  “Now girls,” I think Big Red (otherwise known as Gigi) would be saying, since she’s the bully of the group and the most vocal, “we must all take a lesson from our dear sister’s sacrifice.  We must never leave this space,” she no doubt lifted a wing at this point to indicate the area inside the fence, “unless, of course, I see some decent grasshoppers out there in which case you should all stay here so I can have them and you can’t.”

Somewhere in the middle of her speech, their not-so-fallen sister strutted up to the back of her flock.  All the others would have turned at that point, staring in amazement.  “Oh MY GAWD!  We thought you were DEAD!”

By the way, for me chickens always speak with a really broad, very nasally Chicago accent.

Ed the Angel

“I WAS!” I’m sure she told the others.  “I SAW the light, I swear I DID!  And then it was there, that big THING with the gray feathers below its BEAK.  It’s a MIRACLE!”  At which point she must have paused.  “Funny, I always thought angels would look more like us.”

Heavenly interest in the chicken coop?

By the time I got home from the vet I couldn’t tell which of them Dudley had taken.

Ed says what surprised him most about the whole adventure was that he wasn’t the least winded after all the running.  “Farming life,” he pronounced to me, “is really getting me back in shape!”