I found Rhoda, a Rhode Island Red hen, at a local animal shelter. Her feathers were so matted she seemed to have been living inside a box or crate for some time, and she had an offensive discharge suggesting a prolonged ovary or kidney infection. The volunteer shelter staff had balked at having to feed her because she was "just a chicken."

From the beginning, Rhoda was a gentle and affectionate hen who liked being petted and held. The morning after bringing her home I placed her outside on the grass in the sun. So abruptly did she collapse on her side, close her eyes, and stretch out her wing in a long arc of feathers across the ground that I thought she had died. I lay down beside her. Still, she was breathing, so I let her alone, and for a long time, twenty minutes or more, she never moved so much as an eyelid, and then only to shift herself to allow the other side of her body to take in all the warm sunshine.

Rhoda shared our house where she spent most of her days soaking up the spots of sunbeam that appeared on the floor. The kitchen doorstep was her favorite sunny place. Several times I carried her in my arms down our little pathway out back to visit with Muffie and Fluffie and Henry, our other three chickens who were then living in an old henhouse with a fenced-in tomato garden for a yard. Henry was a young, heavy rooster who had fallen off the truck on the way to the slaughterhouse the summer before. He was very attracted to Rhoda, I could tell. Whenever we appeared, he'd plot eagerly over to the fence and stand there regarding her, then follow us on the inside of the fence as we started to go.

One day after Rhoda had been with us a few weeks, she disappeared from the house. My husband and I searched everywhere. Finally, we went down the little path looking for her. Sure enough, there Rhoda was, conversing with Henry through the fence. She seemed to be getting better under the antibiotics, we felt. Touchingly, after a few minutes, she walked behind us back to the house, and for the first and last time, proceeded to give herself a vigorous dust bath under the big bush at the foot of the kitchen step. It was late afternoon. From this time on, for reasons unclear, Rhoda grew steadily weaker, and within a few days she was dead. We buried her beneath the trees alongside the little pathway not far from where our Henry has since been laid in the ground as well.

RHODA appeared in the Spring 1992 issue of Night Music, the literary magazine of Sigma Tau Delta/Tau Omega at the University of Maryland, College Park. For permission to reprint contact Karen Davis, President, United Poultry Concerns, Inc.