West of Grandpa Newberry’s
blacksmith shop and east a few steps from the chicken coup was his hawk trap
placed on the top of a long pole. I’d
never known it to have caught anything; the weasels usually were the ones that
slipped past the dog to do their dirty work. At night chickens naturally leave the ground
to roost in the fruit trees or move into coups where they are protected by farm dogs
only too anxious to have it out with a predator. You’d never think about chickens being in
danger during the day.
Ma told me in her old age about how,
in 1951, she noticed the disappearance of her chickens, one chicken every day for
two days. On the third day she saw a
Golden Eagle finishing off another on the ground where it had been
killed. Before Ma could finish, I said
it couldn’t have been a Golden Eagle, to which she replied, “I know what a
hawk and an eagle look like!” She also
said it was colored brown and not a Bald Eagle.
She told me that she ran out of the house with a broom stick in hand and
summarily beat the eagle to death. Ma
was quick to say, “It was either her chicks or my chicks.” It’s not as silly or as odd as you might
think. People were poor even in
1951. During the Depression in 1936 in
the drought, old timers used to tell me that if it hadn’t been for turnips,
they would have starved to death.
Sundays would be the time when families had meat and that meant chicken.
This is no ordinary story. I’ve never heard anything like it, but it
happened to our family. I suppose to
some it’s like the passing of many other chapters in the history of the Ozarks;
Uncle Carl shot one of the last wolves in Howell County. Grandpa Ike Cherry accidentally killed a wild
turkey with a rock and was so terrified because turkeys were endangered that he
buried it. The deer were wiped out early
on by legions of Ozark boys and so were the eagles, mostly by DDT. After many decades with the Missouri
Department of Conservation’s help, most of the animals are returning – even
bald eagles.
Although
Ma’s story was personal and real it’s easy to exaggerate its significance. I’m not particularly superstitious, but what
happened to us after Ma killed the Golden Eagle, as recorded in the memoir side
of the Journal of the Silent Majority,
might prove that the eagle got its revenge after all.
