AVIAN AUTOPSY

i had a sick suspicion of what had happened earlier at the apartment when i came home to find the dining room table almost entirely cleared and a platter of delicately stacked feathers at one corner of it. there are pictures, but i asked to be spared a visual narration of the dissection until a time that wasn't so close to bedtime.

i did, however, get the official report on the autopsy.

forest initially suggested that if there were feathers we wanted to keep that they be removed from the body first, as they might be ruined when he parboiled the body in preparation for his incisions. unfortunately, because the hen hadn't completely defrosted (and probably due to quick avian rigor mortis), it was necessary to employ a set of pliers in removing the feathers to be saved, which, after no small amount of effort, were extracted and then piled on the platter that i found when i came home last night. she was a courageous chicken, and the autopsy report makes clear that the battle for her feathers was hard one.

the twist? it didn't take cutting the bird open to find out that perhaps she'd been more courageous than we initially thought (or at least stupider) and that she'd braved the fear that we thought had killed her. upon close inspection, the hen was found to have a gash across and down the right side of its face that had by all indications been bleeding profusely on the night of the raccoon attack. her body showed no other signs of physical trauma. it was concluded that the hen died as a result of blood loss from a laceration to the head likely inflicted by the raccoon that attempted to invade the backyard chicken run in the final hours of tuesday april 5. by what bad luck the raccoon was able to land a blow to the deceased through the chicken wire surrounding the undisturbed wooden framework of the run was undetermined. a forensic investigation was forgone as a result of the crime scene having been tampered with before proper documentation on the night of the attack. (it was dark and we were stressed out, ok?)

then they opened her up. i might be content never to see the pictures. i inferred that the remains of the hen were stowed in a united states postal service priority mail medium size flat rate box that had been emptied of its packing material contents and gone missing from the floor of the kitchen. someone out there might be getting a gruesomely ironic package for easter. that or they buried it. one of the two.

i suppose that closes the case, which now has me thinking about the whole mess more soberly, and i realize that in the chaos of the scrambling of the ranks of the brood over the past few months i never learned that chicken's name. that's sad, but, as they say, there's no use crying over mauled poultry. farewell, chicken lady. i'm calling you mark mckinney.