Dead Hen

When I opened the hen house this morning, all seemed OK; I cracked the ice on their water tub - nothing amiss. That was at 8; I had waited for the temperature to warm up from 15 degrees. By noon I brought scraps and checked for an egg. On the floor was dead white hen, not far from where she would have landed when she jumped off her perch in one of the laying boxes. White hen was consolation chick when the science experiment to incubate eggs failed miserably. She never seemed acclimated to life outside. She molted at the wrong time, like in November. She always seemed separate from the others - none of whom are white, except for the rooster. And she was low on the pecking order. I took her body up Red Bud to lie on top of an old and dense mound of pine branches - high enough to escape Mojo - but good for a sky funeral.