Free Gods of the Morning by John Lister-Kaye

one chews his way in under the door, squeezing his liquid body through the gap like toothpaste from a tube, the result is mayhem. Once the killing instinct is triggered, and because he can’t drag a dead hen out through the hole, he fires his frustration and his ripping canines into every last bird. He becomes a terrorist. Mayhem ensues. To open the door at first light is to view Samson’s slaughter of the Philistines. Corpses heaped in every direction. Once it was twenty-seven hens.
    There is extra pathos to a murdered hen. It’s that pale lower eyelid half eclipsing the eye and the slight gape of the beak that does it; the ignominious end to an undignified existence. The majority of hens live lives of witless desperation in batteries, but Lucy’s are the lucky ones, loved and well blessed. A constant cocktail of left-overs from the kitchen is mixed with their corn; let out every morning,tucked up every night, and a half-acre of wormy old paddock to roam and scratch in. But when I’m sent to collect the eggs and I have to sneak my hand in under a hot, fluffy bum, stealing her pride and her only treasures, I feel a clawing sense of guilt, assuaged only by the thought of scrambled egg the colour of dandelions and by convincing myself that the poor bird has neither the sense nor the instinct to comprehend this outrageous exploitation of her most precious assets.
    Not so when the pine marten strikes. Even a hen knows a predator when she sees one. Wild Indian jungle fowl, Gallus gallus , the progenitor of all domestic chickens, have been dreading predators for something close to a hundred and fifty million years since they emerged in the Jurassic as dinosaurs in feathered disguise. There is nothing we can teach them about fear of predators. In that terrible moment of catatonic panic the hen-house flips in an instant from a sanctuary into a bloody death chamber.
    I’ve never witnessed that panic, but I’ve heard it. The cacophony of screaming hens woke me and sent me rushing out, pyjamaed, across the yard to do what little I could. Too late. As I opened the door the marten shot out between my legs and vanished into the darkness. It was years ago and I can’t remember now how many survived, but only one or two. The rest lay twitching and flapping in the sawdust as if they had been electrocuted.
    *  *  *
    This morning, before the lie-abed sun stirred, I circled the hen-house slowly, carefully placing my feet so as not to blot out the tell-tale prints. The day rose around me, pale and silent. The pine marten had called, all right, all round, up over the nest box lids and onto the felted roof. Searching . . . searching . . . longing for the chink of a gap he could work at – to no avail, I’m glad to report. The prints are immaculate. I can see all five toes and the rosebud curve of the centre pad, claws like punctuation marks dotting each toe. I see where he leaped up onto the nest box lid . . . along it . . . and then long scratches, like etched runes, as he sprang up again, as agile as a squirrel, across the roof.
    I try to imagine his every move. I can read the pauses, see the head rise to look around, the front pads pressing further in – martens are as constantly on the qui vive as a nervous meerkat. I see where he has risen onto his hind legs, intelligent pointed little face testing the air, his long tail faintly feathering the snow behind him, then bounding on in the sinuous, looping pace that so characterises all martens. I guess at the time spent, probably only a minute and a half, ninety seconds of fiercely focused scrutiny, before he headed off again to check out the next best chance of supper.
    A fox has been here too, but earlier, because the marten tracks have crossed on top of the fox’s. How much earlier is anyone’s guess. I stand and stare. A dog or a vixen? I wonder. The sun is struggling through, glowing in a sea of mist. The morning spreads in