During our visit to the US, I chatted with Brian* about his ongoing chicken enterprise. He started his coop and birds the same time we did, but it seems he’s been more successful: we’ve seen ONE egg, and he’s already collected 1,400. Yeah, he’s got a dozen chickens and we have two, but still, it makes me doubt my ability as a chickenherder.

Imagine my surprise, then, when we returned to the village and were told that Henley (our remaining chicken) had laid a dozen eggs in our absence, and was sitting on them. Wow! Of course, nothing is ever simple here. The catch is that she did it at Manuel’s house.

As Emily tried to contain her annoyance, we went over to see for ourselves. “There she is,” Lina (Manuel’s wife) told us, pointing to the hen in the corner. “She just comes here, I can’t explain it. Maybe she doesn’t like your house.” Then she proceeded to move the squawking chicken to show us a pile of warm, incubating eggs. “You can’t eat these; they already have chicks inside.” She went on to explain that it would be best if we left the hen at their house, at least for the time being, until the chicks hatched. Then she stepped into her kitchen and brought out the first two eggs they collected, giving them to us as a consolation prize.

About an hour later, I was washing clothes in the basin in front of Nas Palas’s house, when Nas’s wife came out to chat.

“That chicken sure is sitting on a lot of eggs,” she said matter-of-factly. “What are you going to do?”

“I dunno,” I answered, thinking about the last time Manuel tried to get one of our AWOL chickens. “I guess we’ll just have to tie the hen up to our coop. I am certainly NOT going to give it to Manuel, just because it started hanging out at his house.”

She smiled a little to herself, sortof hoping that would be my answer. “You know, Lina bought those eggs and put them under your hen.”

I stopped, and had her repeat herself. Yep, Manuel’s wife bought eggs as a lure to get our hen accustomed to living in their house.

A few minutes later, Emily came by, and I explained to her how they’d purposefully tried to steal our chicken. “Figures,” she said, getting even madder. “And that explains why Lina took the first two eggs, but left the others under the hen.” Obviously, Manuel’s plan is to get us to give them the chicken, just like before when Ellie started living in their house.

So, we hatched a plan of our own. We can’t just confront Manuel directly with the lies and duplicity; we have to work with the guy all the time. But Emily’s already spoke with our buddy Lucia the nurse. Lucia’s sister lives in town, and has a hen that already lays, and would be willing to trade for our layer. Since the hen isn’t from around here, it won’t know the area and try to live elsewhere. In addition, we are going across the valley to buy two more from Maribel, who sold us the two good chickens we had before. With three, they won’t get lonely either. And Manuel doesn’t get a cent.

* Not to be confused with “Chicken Brian”, who donated the money to buy us some replacement chickens after our first ones turned out to be roosters.