Bruce Kiskaddon
Rhoda Sivell
Doug Richards
Badger Clark
Glen Rafuse
Bruce Kiskaddon
Hartley Urquhart
Mike Puhallo
Bryn Thiessen
Phyllis Rathwell
Robert W. Service
Harold Webber
Bryn Thiessen
Bruce Kiskaddon
Sherrill Forsyth
Pete Perrin
Doris Bircham
Wendy Vaughan
Sherm Ewing
Doug Richards
Phyllis Rathwell
Henry Herbert Knibbs
Bryan J. Smith
Fred Miller
Frank Gleeson
Doris Bircham
Frank Gleeson
Doris Daley
Jace Richarde
Neil Meili
Lesley Stuart-Smith
James Barton Adams
Terri Mason
Barbara Robin
Diamond Doug Keith
Merv Webster
Mereline Griffith
Reg Kesler

Cowboy Poetry

Feb-Mar 2005

Prairie Chicken

By Neil Meili (c)

I came through the valley where the homesteaders had tried to make a go of it for a few years, past the tin cans and other evidence of their short stay trying to rust itself back into the ground. Up over the crest of the hill where the Indians had lived for centuries with no more evidence than the weathered rocks of teepee rings.

It was spring and I stumbled onto what they may have seen for years, the ageless mating ceremony of about twenty-five or thirty grouse. They didn't see or hear me and I stopped about ten yards away and watched, although my mother might not have thought it proper.

The hens ran around, heads down and tails high in unbashful invitation; while the cocks puffed up the air bags in their chests and drummed their challenge.

And they looked handsome and brave in their posturing and beckoning and their readiness for reckoning. And the fights were on, straight on and straight up, with spurs and feathers flying.

It was vicious but pure. Not a cock fight for the amusement of the bloody minded,
but a way to see that only the strongest would sire the little broods that
would have to survive the hawks and the snakes and the weather
and all the dangers of a land where it
takes a great deal of courage -
just to be a chicken.