Remember the ducklings? They are now fully grown ducks, and six of them are drakes. And that means that today was Doomsday for the drakes. Or Decapitation Day. Or Death Day.
Whatever alliterative name you want to give it, those drakes were going down. (Hey look! There's another!)
So A. went out and sharpened his hatchet at 7:30 this morning and unceremoniously whacked the heads off of five drakes on the pile of wood awaiting splitting outside the duck pen.
The children were, of course, present for this. Cubby was mad that we didn't let him do the decapitating, actually, but we'll give him another year before he gets that job.
He did get to help, though. After the deed was done, the MiL was standing there with both hands clutching the feet of all the dead drakes and she asked, "Who's going to pick up the heads?"
Well, I know who isn't going to be picking up any drake heads. Hi!
But there were two very willing head hunters. Allow me to present Cubby and Charlie, the totally unsqueamish butcher helpers. And hunt they did, because some of the heads had fallen kind of in between the chunks of wood and weren't all that easy to see. So I told Cubby and Charlie to start searching for five heads. At which point Cubby exclaimed with glee, "It's like hide and seek, but hide and heads!"
Right. Carry on, my small country bumpkins.
Oh my. Seems so wrong on so many levels, but also so right as this is the beginning of how all our meat products get to our sterile supermarkets; people like me just don't get to see it - thank god. Some things are just better unwitnessed, at least by uninitiated adults.
ReplyDelete"The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said, without even looking round." Sister's Sailor
ReplyDeleteSpeechless! Mary in MN
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