Rooster and Rice

R.I.P

Our good friends next door called me today to tell me that they found our rooster dead in their hen-house this morning. Now that sounds like a case for CSI, doesn't it? Except, we all knew our rooster had recently abandoned his family of ten (now nine actually after an unfortunate incident involving a hawk) and shacked up with the two single hens next door. This may (or may not) have also had something to do with a incident in which I whacked the poor time-impaired bird off of a chair with a flashlight outside my bedroom window at 4:45 in the morning. Or when Bryan pegged him with a rock at 4:30 am on a separate occasion. (Neither of us actually meant to hit him. It was dark and we were only half conscious. What are the chances?) Nonetheless, I went next door after I got the call and sure enough, there he was, dead as a doornail. The weird thing is, we couldn't figure out what killed him. There were no abrasions or contusions, no signs that he has been sick (not that I would know what those were in the first place), and upon a closer postmortem examination, no fang marks, either insect or reptilian. We all stood around and stared at the rooster in silence for a moment, each with the same burning question:"Is it safe to eat him?" We asked around and the general consensus was a shrug of the shoulders followed by a confidence-evoking, "Sure, why not?"
Before I say what you know I am about to say, let me mention that chicken is not sold anywhere here (at least not in the non-feathered, non-pecking, non-crowing at 4:30 am kind of way) and I haven't eaten poultry in two months. I felt my "Lord of the Flies" side kick in as I carried my once sorta-pet by his feet back to my house, handed him to our Askari and told him if he would do the dirty work, I would cook the bird up for the both of us. Which is exactly what happened. I ate my rooster for supper. And he was delicious!
So the moral of the story is, if I come down with claw-in-mouth disease or poultry flu or something equally terrible, you guys will know why. Really my only concern now is that Asad and Nimir, who thought they had died and gone to heaven when I gave them those chicken bones, will put two and two together and start looking and those little chicken babies running around the yard differently...

And on a much happier note, BRYAN COMES HOME TOMORROW!