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WINNER
CAT & OTHER ANIMALS
I want to write down the story of
Hoppy because I was the only one that saw it, and most
people think I’m making it up.
It began when a family we knew were
going to move interstate. They had a family of bantams
which they couldn’t take with them, so they offered
them to Mum. My sisters clamoured for Mum to say ’yes’,
but I could tell from Mum’s face that she was
trying to think of a nice way to say ‘no’.
The girls pleaded and begged, so
Mum eventually gave in, on condition that the girls
took on the job of feeding the bantam family. They did,
till the chicks lost their fluffy cuteness and began
to grow feathers and long legs. Mum threatened to get
rid of them, till my brother said he’d feed them,
and when they were full grown, he’d sell them
to a butcher. Of course Mum would pay for their feed,
but he reminded her she would have the eggs when the
mother bantam was finished looking after her family
and started laying eggs.
That was working ok. My brother never
missed a feeding. He was looking forward to the time
when the bantam chicks were full grown, working out
how much he’d make from their sale.
It was summer, and one Sunday we
all went for a long drive to a great beach for a picnic.
We were away nearly all day. As soon as we got home,
my brother mixed up the food for the bantams and went
to give them their supper.
We all heard the great scream of
rage and raced to the chook yard. It was a scene of
chaos. Broken wire, feathers everywhere, one bantam
dead, and another about to die. My brother was ropeable.
‘A damned dog! I’ll kill the brute. It must
be that mongrel of Batesie’s. They’re the
only ones who let their dog run loose’.
The mother bantam was huddled in
a corner, trying to cover the rest of her chicks, with
outspread wings. Mum picked her up. One of her legs
was hanging at a funny angle. There was another scream
of rage from my brother. ‘Oh! That mongrel has
broken her leg! Now she’ll have to be put down.’
We all stood silent. Then my brother
said, in a small voice to Mum, ‘Can’t you
do something?’
She shook her head slowly. The girls
burst into tears. The Mum said. ‘I’ll try.
You kids find me three icypole sticks. I’ll get
that plaster.’ She went off. I thought how lucky
it was we had plaster. Only because of the porthole
we had made in the plaster wall one wet day, in our
bedroom, to look through to the kitchen so we’d
know when dinner was ready. We all got ‘what-ho’
for that, but there was the plaster when it was needed.
My brother held the mother bantam
while Mum went to work with gauze-soaked plaster, icypole
sticks and thick string. I heard my brother mutter,
‘She must have been a witch doctor in a previous
life’, as she put the bantam hen down. ‘No
use telling her not to walk on it’, Mum said,
but that hen seemed to know she had to take things easy.
She hopped around on it for several
weeks, then began to peck at it. Mum said she must know
when it was knitted, so she cut the plaster off. That
hen always walked with a limp after that. That’s
how she got the name Hoppy.
The rest of the chicks grew up and
my brother was quite pleased at the money he got for
them. Next time Hoppy got all clucky, Mum put four hen
eggs under her. Four chicks hatched out. It was funny
to see Hoppy bossing them around when they soon got
to be bigger than her. I was mending my bike one day
when I heard the most ear-splitting scream from the
chook yard. A sound like an animal in agony.
I dropped everything and ran. Then
the most awesome sight I have ever seen happened.
Over the fence of the chook yard
flew the biggest monster of a grey tom cat, and there
on its back was Hoppy, claws dug in, beak grasping a
tuft of skin and hair on the back of the cat’s
head as it raced across the garden, hardly seeming to
touch the ground as it headed for a farther fence, and
then it rose like a Harrier Jet, at least two metres
to clear the fence. Cat and jockey were out of sight
when I reached the fence.
That tom will look for something
low to scrape Hoppy off, I thought. She’ll get
hurt. I ran across several back gardens, climbed fences
till I saw her coming towards me, slowly, wings dragging.
I picked her up. No obvious signs of wounds, but she
kept quiet for the rest of the day and wouldn’t
eat her supper.
She recovered, and only seemed concerned
to see that those overgrown chickens were all right.
That cat must have seemed as big as a tiger to her,
but she tackled it to protect her chicks, even if they
were ring-ins. I wondered how she felt on that wild
ride and if bantam hens have any memory. I hope she
did and remembered that awesome ride. She must have
felt like Mick Doohan on the last lap of his first Grand
Prix. No roar from the crowd, but I saw it, and I thought
it the bravest thing I’m ever likely to see.
When I told people about it they
gave me funny looks. ‘Bantams don’t tackle
cats! Specially ones the size of that grey one. I’ve
seen him scare dogs off.’ But I know what I saw
and I think she’s a little hero.
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