Little Red Rooster

I'm a little red rooster, too lazy to crow for days
Just a little red rooster, too lazy to crow for days
Keep everything in the barnyard people, upset in every way
-Grateful Dead

The members of the Grateful Dead obviously never lived in the South Pacific. I have yet to meet a rooster too lazy to crow. Next to our house is a vacant lot, which in Samoa has a very different meaning than it does in the real world. Here a vacant lot is typically in the process of being reclaimed by nature, quickly. Our vacant lot has many coconut palms, papaya, and bananas. Within this neighborhood “jungle” lives a rooster. It is hard to say if this is a domesticated chicken or a red jungle fowl, but with all the interbreeding it is likely somewhere in-between.

As a child I had always learned that roosters crow around sunrise and wake the farmer for the day’s chores….in the Midwest this may be true, but sadly here in Samoa that is most certainly untrue. Another childhood perception abolished. So the next thing you must be wondering is “What time do they crow then?”

4 a.m.!

The sun is not up at 4 am. No, here in Samoa 4 am is in fact, the middle of the night. Someone really needs to explain this horrible error to these damn roosters. And yes I meant roosters. You see, the one that lives outside my window crows to all his neighborhood buddies, who in turn “cock-a-doodle-doo” incessantly for around an hour and a half. Just long enough to ruin a night’s sleep and not give you enough time to fall back asleep before getting up to go to work.

I can’t of course bring myself to just wantonly kill the rooster. I haven’t lived on the island long enough to have lost all my respect for animal life (though the dogs are trying my patience). So I just periodically lob a well placed rock or shell towards the rooster in an attempt to dent its head. Sadly, this just shuts it up for 10 minutes and then emboldened by its brush with death, it crows all the louder.

Now don’t be misled. The roosters do not only crow at 4 am. No, these obnoxious little creatures go on at seemingly random intervals around the clock. When do they sleep? Honestly, does anyone know? I want to set my alarm and get up and annoy the shit out of the roosters for a change.

But I turned the tide of the war the other day….

So I was heading to work and as I turned the corner onto the main road, what do I see but the biggest fattest rooster standing in the middle of the road. Floor it and kill the bastard…. No, as I said I just can’t wantonly kill one even as obnoxious as they are. After all they are just being roosters and doing what roosters have always done. So what did I do? I kept driving, all the time mumbling to myself… “get out of the road stupid chicken. I am not stopping for you. Get out of the way…”. So as I near the rooster, what does it do? Does it get out of the way? Run across the road as the oft told joke says? No! The stupid rooster stretches to its full height and “Cock-a-doodl”- Thud. As I looked into the rear view mirror I felt pretty bad that I had just killed an animal. Then it occurred to me I had simply fed a dog. And dogs have a right to eat too. Justified in my grand act of saving a dog from the wretched starvation they typically endure I merrily continued on my way to work. So I looked into the rear-view mirror one last time, only this time to see some random old Samoan woman stooping down to collect the chicken. Well, it wasn’t going to get wasted.

I regularly see coconuts falling from the trees in my next-door vacant lot. It is my sincerest desire that the rooster which lives there will someday be standing underneath as one plummets out of the sky. “The sky is falling. The sky is falling.”- Thud.

Damn chickens, why do they taste so good?

-Paul (with photo of our rooster by Emma Brown)