Only Seven Animals? Why Not A Hundred?

When we first started getting pets Mom gave us this rule, "We can have as many animals as there are main characters on Gillian's Island." Basically, that meant seven. We stuck to that rule for awhile. We even named some of our animals after the characters. There were Mr. and Mrs. Howl (is that how you spell their name?), the two parakeets. We had Gillian, the cat and Skipper, the fish. We even had two dogs that were named Ginger and Maryanne but they got mean and we had to send them away. The others slowly followed. Skipper, my fish, died after an…accident. We were going to camp and I didn’t want him to die of hunger so I gave him the whole bottle of food. Needless to say, when my dad got home, the fish was dead. He got flushed. As for the Howls (I’m pretty sure I’m spelling this wrong, let me look it up… Ha ha! I was right that I was wrong! It is spelled ‘Howell’!), they left with our aunt when she moved to town. Gillian died after many happy years of scratching at our ankles. : )

The rule eventually went out the window. It started with three mangy chickens and one small, ‘A’ shaped house. The chickens were called Rose, fluffy and…I can’t remember the other one. It might have been Lily or something but I’m not sure. These chickens were soon followed by about a hundred more which we shared joint ownership of with our neighbors. We kids went wild with excitement! One hundred cute little balls of fluff just for us to ‘play with’ (which basically means torture, in this case.) We dressed them up in who knows what and took one along with us just about everywhere we could get away with. We could not get away with it when going to church. Evidentially, cute balls of fluff did not have a place there.

We got the goats, of course, and three small, cute goslings. First they lived inside but that didn’t last very long. They soon went out with the chickens. It was the barnyard for them! Every year they attempted to have babies and every year they just failed! We finally learned the reason. You won’t believe this but we didn’t have a male! Now why didn’t we think of that? Who knows!

We kept a few of the chickens (round thirty or so) but the rest were chicken dinner! No, we did not eat seventy chickens. Half of them went to our neighbors (who owned part them). First came the killing. At that age we didn’t think nothing of it. The neighbor girl came over and we had an awesome time watching them run about with their heads chopped off. Well, we had a fun time until one chased us across the yard! No, I’m not kidding, it did!

You should have seen Jules! She was probably three at the time. Dressed in a pink to-to, cute as could be and running around picking up the chicken heads to throw away. Of all the strange things!

After we got done we had lots of hens and something like ten roosters. I’ll tell you right now, ten is too many roosters. They will fight and crow none stop! Did you know that a rooster crows to tell people that it is his territory? They don’t just crow at dawn, that is a myth! And if you have ten roosters all claiming your yard as its territory, the others are going to crow back their objections. This makes for one noisy yard! Our main problem, though, was the Big Bad Rooster. Yes, we actually called it that. We also called a different one Butterfly, so in comparison, Big Bad Rooster isn’t so bad. The Big Bad Rooster really was big and bad. He didn’t mind attacking you, even looked like he enjoyed it! If you ask me, he was rude. He steered clear of two people: Peter and Jules. Peter he steered clear of because if he dared attack him he’d get a beak full of stick or rock. Peter, even at his young age, would not put up with a rooster attacking him.

Jules on the other hand was a totally different matter! You all remember Thelma, the goat? (Or should I say the watch dog?) One day Jules was out in the yard. Now, the Big Bad Rooster loved to sneak up on people and attack them from behind. He was doing just that when Thelma came charging at him. He went flying through the air to never again return to stock Jules! No, I’m not kidding! Honest! This really happened. I think God used that goat, as strange and fairy-tale as that sounds!

We had all kind of other times with the animals but I’ll let you all go for now.

Yours truly,

Mandy