Our Neighbors' Last Rooster by Jeffrey Sharlet

          Two days ago a fat red fox stalked our two acres on the edge of our neighbor’s untended 170, hunting our marmalade tabby, Nina, right under the afternoon sun. Our dog, Frieda, who is a red coon hound puppy from Mississippi, barked the fox away. That night the fox skulked along the road and in the dark took our neighbors’ last rooster. The rooster died bravely, said our neighbor, squawking and alarming and leading the fox away from the hens, down to the road where it lost its first flight of black and white feathers and then further, where another bed of feathers had become a home, when we found them the next day, for an orange salamander. My daughter Bithiah (not her real name) and the neighbor girl, Phoebe (nor hers; their names belong to them and these dirt roads), set the feathers afloat in a criss-crossing stream, running from one side of each culvert to the other to see them float out from under.
 
         Phoebe wanted to show us the body. It lay among purple wild flowers, red and open and meaty where the fox had taken its head and shoulders. Phoebe poked a stick in and hoisted it up. “A puppet,” she said. Bithiah nodded. She’d been learning about elephants in school, and ivory, and how wrong it is to kill an animal for just one piece, tusks or feathers. “That’s good,” she said. “You have to use all the parts.” The stick cracked. The body dropped. My little boy pointed to an ant by the wound. Bithiah said that was good, too, and then the kids walked home for strawberry popsicles.
 
         I went down to the stream at five this morning. When I was Bithiah’s age my grandfather Irving gave me a hard yellow rooster spur, souvenir of a cock fight about which he said nothing. Until I was ten I thought it a totem. I wanted one for Bithiah. Maybe just a picture. But this morning, the rooster was gone. He’d done his job again, the rest of him filling some other creature’s belly. So I picked up a feather and dropped it on one side of the culvert and then ran to the other, waiting for it to flow out from under, which it never did. Just the water and this day’s pale white light of dawn.