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We’ve lost three more birds. Well, two birds we killed to eat. Ali took two of the meat chickens over to the neighbours so that he could learn how to slaughter and clean them. He came back ages later with a chicken in a bag, all cleaned up and ready to eat. It was a weird experience for me, and i didn’t even go with him, but he said everything went well, and he left one chicken with the neghbours for their trouble. Well, that same day, as I was planting out some raspberry canes and Ali was cleaning out the box that we kept the ducklings in, Baki came down the path looking freaked out, with a dead duckling in his hands. All I can surmise is that he killed the duck and that it was an accident. I think it was like in that Frankenstein movie where the Monster is playing with a little girl and he ends up drowning her. Needless to say, Baki was upset.
I decided to cook the chicken in the oven, but did not fire it for long enough so the chicken ended up ever so slightly undercooked, which is just bad news. So dinner was awful and I felt terrible because we had killed this chicken and no one even liked eating it. After Baki went to bed, I just sat down and cried, it had been such an awful day.
The next day, I made stock with the chicken bones and used the meat in a casserole that everyone liked well enough. We renamed the remaining duck Gingko, and it follows us around everywhere while we work in the garden. We keep it in its box most of the time, because we don’t want to step on it, but when Gingko gets out of the box, he marches around after us, chattering away. We’ll know if Gingko is a boy or a girl in a few weeks — once they get a bit older, boys squawk while girls quack.