Toby Makes Friends With a Chicken

Those of you who know me well, know that I like animals. So naturally, I wanted to befriend the local chicken, whose job it was to scour the garden in search of small bugs to eat. It however, had something different in mind... plotting his escape from the confines of the yard (Insert dramatic dun dun duh). While some bystanders may later accuse me of "chasing" the chicken, I was merely attempting to offer it a handful of corn while it, how you say, went in the opposite direction. Low and behold, while I was persuasively trying to offer this chicken some corn, it seized the opportunity to use its momentum to leap upon an outdoor sink and scale the four foot concrete wall. My heart skipped a beat! How would I explain the loss of our host Tomasa's beloved chicken? This was her fifth chicken as all the others had either eaten her flowers or pooed on the porch. I must go after it! Dashing through the gate and around the wall, I ran to the point where I had last seen the escapee. "How far can a young chicken travel?" I asked myself. Not that far it turns out as just as soon as saying that, I spotted the lil' chick in a bush along the wall. Another predicament stood before me... how does one even catch a chicken? I ripped off a branch of the nearest bush, hoping to use it as a broom-like device to merely sweep the chicken toward the door in the wall. This worked at first, until the chick decided a few bushes away, that it could go no further and just had to turn around. We did this dance a few times before I realized that... this chicken wanted to be caught. I mean, it was asking for it, right?!? Throwing down my branch, I moved forward with both hands, silently praying that no one was watching me because I knew how stupid I had to look. I invisibly pushed the chicken forward with my hands until he reached his turning point again, this time as he changed directions I lunged forward into a mass of feathers with a beak and some wings flying around in the mess as well. When the dust had settled, I had came out the victor with one little chicken in my hands. I then realized I had an answer... you catch a chicken with two hands. As I rounded the corner of the wall back into the yard, Brittany stood looking on in amazement. What happened next however surprised me the most. It seems the little fellow, or fellette (it is kind hard to tell), had taken a liking to me. Cuddling up on my sweatshirt I lifted my hand off its back and the chicken simply uttered a short "goubl." Which I understood to mean something along the lines of "Thank you for rescuing me, Toby. I love you" in chicken-speak. When the time came for me to go inside, instead of quietly going on its way it crawled up and perched itself upon my shoulder, as seen in this picture. At that point I knew I had made a new friend in Guatemala.