Tak

Childhood's End - Part 3

     It took some time to arrange, of course, and several more weeks went by before the grey wizard was in a position to make his move.

     Spring gave way to summer and the crops grew tall in the fields. Tak's father took a pair of goats to the Callier homestead in one of their wagons, to keep an arrangement they'd made the previous market day, and returned four days later with a cockerel and four hens which he released into an enclosure Tak had spent the past few days building from some old wooden stakes and bits of string they'd found in the back of the barn.

     "We'll let him visit one of his wives, so we'll have chicks to grow up into hens for the table," his father said as the birds got busy scratching around. "The other three will provide us with a steady supply of eggs. You've never tasted chicken, have you?"

     Tak and Laira both shook their heads. Their mother had shot the occasional crow with the crossbow during the darkest days of winter in an attempt to stretch their food supply, and they had been bitter and stringy.

     Their father saw their expressions of disgust and laughed, ruffling their hair. "You've got a treat coming," he told them. "Chicken meat is the sweetest meat the Gods ever put on this world. We've got to keep an eye out for foxes, though. They like hens as well, and one of em'll slaughter the lot and carry away just the one. Old man Callier gave me a few tips for dealing with them."

     They had eggs for breakfast the very next day, and it was the last meal Tak ever ever had in that cabin. He'd eaten eggs before. Warbler eggs and meadowhopper eggs. They were little things they popped whole into their mouths, shells and all, but these eggs were bigger than any he'd ever seen, so big that he had to eat them one bite at a time as if they were honeycakes. His eyes widened in wonder.

     "It's delicious!" he cried in delight and gobbled the rest while his father grinned in amusement. "How often do they lay?"

     "So long as they have plenty to eat, they should lay every day."

     "Every day!" cried Tak in astonishment. "But other birds only lay once or twice a year!"

     "All birds will lay every week or so if you keep taking their eggs away. If you let a hen keep its eggs it wouldn't lay any more until they hatched. To lay everyday is exceptional, though. The Gods must have just made them that way."

     "So we can have eggs for breakfast every day?" cried the boy in delight.

     His father laughed again. "You'll get tired of them before long. You'll be crying out for your porridge and gramm."

     "No I won't!" stated Tak emphatically. "I want to have eggs for breakfast every day for the rest of my life!"

     He was still thinking about eggs when he went out into the fields with a wicker basket three feet across to pick taffleheads. Taffles grew as weeds wherever the ground was broken up by ploughing, and if left would choke everything else in the field, but most homesteaders set one small field aside for the twisty, climbing plants because their cottony seed heads were ideal for stuffing pillows and mattresses. Tak's mother had a favourite pillow that had belonged to her grandmother and was still as soft and plump as it had ever been, needing only a handful of new stuffing every few years or so.

     If tafflecushions were allowed to become damp, though, they became musty and smelly, and sometimes the shoot of a young taffle plant would poke its way through the richly embroidered covering. Several pillows now needed restuffing as a result of a leak in the roof that had appeared during the previous week's rainstorm, and it was lucky that this minor calamity had occurred just before the year's crop of seed heads were due to pop open.