23. The Watchdogs ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

Ida was exasperated. The foxes kept taking her chickens, even though she closed the chickens in the hog farrowing house that Robert had built in Mr. Coffman’s class.

“Joe, I think I’ll give the last three chickens to Mrs. Bowen,” Ida said over her bowl of oatmeal one morning.

Joe, who had raised chickens for a good portion of his income during much of his early adult life, said, “It would be strange not to have any chickens. We’d have to buy all our eggs.”

“We’re doing that now,” Ida said, adding raisins and brown sugar to her oatmeal. “I’d like to try guinea hens, instead.”

“I would suppose the foxes would consider guinea hens as succulent as chickens,” Joe suggested, pouring milk on his cornflakes.

Robert, who had miraculously escaped having to eat oatmeal, was having cornflakes with the boys’ father while Charles had oatmeal with their mother. Robert could hardly wait to discover where the conversation would lead.

“People who always have to be right can’t learn anything new,” Ida, the former teacher, responded, smiling.

“What are guinea hens?” Robert asked.

“Guinea fowl are birds about the size of chickens,” Joe replied.

“Mrs. Bowen has some keets that she wants to give me,” Ida said. “Her guinea hens hid their nests so well that she didn’t find them in time, and now she has too many keets.”

“I guess we should try guineas,” Joe said.

“They’re better than watchdogs,” Ida added, encouragingly. “They’ll let us know if we have prowlers.”

“I doubt if we would ever have a prowler out here in the country,” Joe said.

“‘People who always have to be right—’” Charles began.

“Hush!” Ida interrupted. “I can talk to your father that way, but you can’t.” She turned toward Joe. “‘—can’t learn anything new, ’” she finished. After a second, everyone laughed heartily.

So the Rhode family had no more chickens, but Ida, Joe, Charles, and Robert had guineas aplenty.

As the keets grew into full guineas, they were slate-colored with white dots in swirls and lines all over their feathered plumpness. Their heads were mostly white. The dark lines over their eyes could have been eyebrows, imparting to their glance an air of being perpetually indignant. Perhaps they were vexed most of the time! Their pale yellow and pink beaks were rather thick. Red wattles curved out to the sides like ribbon bows. Pink and yellow helmets stuck up like folded newspaper hats. The skinny legs and long toes were the same yellowish pink.

Rather than screaming whenever they saw a fox, the guineas screeched at anything that moved.

On an early spring day when impossibly dark clouds surrounded small apertures of transparently blue sky and beams of sunshine like those of spotlights made bright yellow patches along the fern-green fencerows, the guineas shrieked at each change of light and shade in the heavens and on the earth. Really, they needed no provocation to scream bloody murder. Whenever the spirit moved them, they screeched!

The guineas defined the word flock, epitomizing what was meant when “flock” was coined. Where one went, all went. Schools of fish on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom could not have changed direction in synchronized movements any more uniformly than guineas. First, they would scurry toward a hedge apple tree, but, for no apparent reason, they would veer right or left in unison, squawking the while.

Even though they had been kept for long periods inside the farrowing house to teach the guineas where home was located, they ignored the house as soon as they were permitted to roam freely. If the Williams place had not been an oasis of trees and slough in the midst of broad fields with neighbors not nearby, the guineas might well have gone vacationing down the road, sampling what each farmstead had to offer. Joe reasoned that the only factor pressuring them to stay put was the general emptiness in all directions.

The guineas preferred to roost in the hedge apple trees at night.

“How they avoid the foxes is beyond me!” Joe exclaimed to Ida, whose face broke into a big smile of satisfaction every time she gave consideration to her guinea hens.

Robert had been surprised to hear guineas in the uppermost branches of the hedge apple trees at dusk. That they made their way up that high and back down again was remarkable for such large birds.

While guinea is said to taste like pheasant, Charles and Robert never found out, as Ida would not have put one of her pet guineas in a roasting pan for love or money.

The small tan guinea eggs with their brown speckles, though, were broken and their contents fried or scrambled for breakfast.

“See?” Ida happily said to Joe. “We don’t have to buy so many eggs at the grocery store now.”

“People who always have to be right,” Joe said, not completing the sentence but winking at Ida.

Like turkeys, the guineas formed circles around anything foreign, such as a frog. “Chi-chi-chi-chi-chi!” they cried in a huff, their heads ogling for a better view, their feet lifting and redeploying continually. At feeding time, they could form circles around the farmer with the feed bucket. “Chi-chi-chi-chi-chi!”

Robert became accustomed to the guineas’ shrill outcries. To him, they sounded like an old disk—not equipped with wheels—being pulled along a gravel road. Their noise became part of the environment. It became more noticeable when they quit screaming for an extended period of time than when they screeched.

Ida could not have been happier with her decision to acquire the guineas.