SOS Gab & Eti 1.21

Buck Orgrease owned a telepathic Rose Comb Rhode Island Red so full of psi
power that all a human had to do was think up some amazing incredible simply
ordinary thing to be done, even a difficult task like pecking on the red
checker instead of the black one, and she would faithfully follow through as
the master mentally proscribed.

One overcast Thursday morning, right after their coffee and toast, Buck and
his friend Constable Portocini wanted to assay the further limits of the
psychic powers of this remarkable fowl. Constable Portocini sat down with a
black indelible marker, with his backside turned to the hen, at the drop leaf
oak parlor table and laboriously wrote out instructions in one and three-
quarter inch high block letters on a four-inch by nine-inch scrap from a
discarded brown paper bag and handed it to Buck. "Gat kayrrot hare udder
room." They were kind of squished letters on the right side.

"You trying to win a mail order contest or what?" said Buck. Constable
Portocini ignored his friend's remark. Buck put on his K-mart front-cashier-
counter special $2.98 reading glasses and read the printed instructions.

"What's this letter here?"

"K."

"Oh, I thought it was a Z."

"No, that is a K."

"Are you sure? It looks like a lot like a Z from here," holding the paper at
arms length from his nose.

"Don't show the paper."

"What?"

"Turn the paper, Mars can see what I wrote."

"I said she was a mind reader, not educated."

"You got her from old Ben Dickerson, right?"

"Yeah. So?"

"You never know what a hen would do for Ben."

"You don't think he taught her to read writing as well as read thinking do
you?"

"Never know."

"Gosh," scraping his chin. "What's this letter here, I can't make it out."

"That's an A."

"Oh. So what's this, a Q?"

"Ok, ok. You don't want to spell out the whole thing!"

Buck eventually made it to the end of the printed instructions.

"You don't think making faces has anything to do with it?"

"Nah, I done this before when I was shaving."

Buck grabbed the hen by the neck as it began pecking for unseen Japanese
Beetle grubs behind the Victorian drapes.

"Come here you clucker. You gonna show my friend Bill here some voodoo magic."

Buck held the chicken up in the air near the fireplace mantle, next to the
Fats Domino chime clock and the gray squirrel, the John Wayne memorial
decanter at the other end of the black walnut slab. The gray squirrel must
have upset the chicken because it was flapping around a lot. The chicken was
flapping around, the squirrel was stiff dead, stuffed with yellow glass eyes.
Buck looked steady into one black eye of Mars for several seconds without
mumbling.

][<en Follett