By RACHEL SAUER
The Daily Sentinel
The winter of life slips in unnoticed with silent steps, freezing the bloom of youth in an inexorable frost. Eyes dim, luster fades. Feathers fall out.
But some fires burn unquenched — the rapture of existence, the ecstatic frenzy to live. And to love.
So, Roscoe went out walking.
Across the fields of his life, and also the one next door, he went in pursuit of the great mystery. The path was fraught, the obstacles overwhelming and, sometimes, horned. But his resolve was unfettered, his heart beat true, and love followed.
“I don’t know why Roscoe got the romantic here lately,” said Ike Berry, who grieved when it seemed Roscoe wouldn’t come home and rejoiced when he did. “He never showed much of an interest before.”
It’s never too late, though! Until the last life’s breath is drawn, it’s never too late.
And now Roscoe has a girlfriend.
Just look at this fella! That extra uh-huh in his swagger, the glossy preen to his whiskey-hued feathers, a lady by his side. Around the coop and into the heated hutch — formerly his, now theirs — Roscoe and his honey, side by side.
“I call her Hazel,” said Ike, who celebrates his 83rd birthday today.
He and Roscoe have known each other for a long time.
“I have no idea what breed he is,” Ike said. “A man gave me that rooster, oh my golly, seven, eight years ago. I figure he’s about 10.” That’s quite old for a chicken.
Ike, who lives on four acres in Mack with his wife, Gail, six dogs, a llama, a mule, some horses and a menagerie of cats that come and go, is very fond of animals. He grew up on a ranch in Cimarron and moved to the Grand Valley in 1955, retiring years ago from the highway department.
And Ike always had chickens. He and his first wife had upward of 150 chickens at various times and not too long ago, he had 12 laying hens, whose eggs he gave to people having trouble, people who maybe were having a hard time getting food on the table. But those hens were mean. When Roscoe entered their fold, “those other chickens just beat him up, oh, terrible, they like to’ve killed him,” Ike recalled.
“So, I made a promise to him if he didn’t die, I’d make a good home for him the rest of his life.”
Roscoe heroically pulled through, and Ike kept his promise. That meant ordering the chain-link coop and plywood hutch from a catalog, and assembling them, and pulling the peaked tarp roof tight, and rigging a heater for cold winter nights.
Over the years, Roscoe roamed the length and breadth of his home. In summer, he went between his coop to the cozy spot across the gravel driveway, shaded by an A-frame awning. In the evening, he strolled back to his coop.
Despite his friendship with Ike — it didn’t take long for Roscoe to start answering to his name when Ike called — Roscoe was, in many ways, alone. As the hens died, Ike didn’t replace them, and for three or four years, Roscoe was the only chicken around.
So, one day several weeks ago, Roscoe set out across the field between Ike’s and Susie Webb’s place, where there were seven hens.
“He went to see Susie’s chickens,” Ike explained. “At night, I called to him and he was clear in her yard, but he come right up along the fence over there.
“But that black steer happened to be here and he got to chasing my rooster, and I didn’t see him no more. He didn’t come home that night.
“I was pretty down,” Ike said.
He woke up the next morning resolved to ask Susie if he could look through her corrals, but “lo and behold, he was home!” Ike remembered. “Just there in his enclosure.”
It snowed that day, so Ike left the gate to Roscoe’s enclosure open, per their habit, figuring “he ain’t going nowhere in this storm,” Ike said.
The next morning, Gail looked out the window and told Ike, “Roscoe’s got a girlfriend.”
Sure enough, there was a sassy little number with iridescent black feathers and a red comb, right at Roscoe’s side. Ike did a little investigating in the fresh snow and there was a single track of prints along the fence, heading from Susie’s place to Ike’s.
That night, the phone rang.
“It was dark out and I couldn’t find her,” Susie explained, “so I called Ike and said, have you got an extra chicken?”
“I said yes, and I’d like to buy her, Roscoe sure seems to love her,” Ike said. “Susie said if he loves her that much, you can have her.”
Oh, Roscoe and Hazel. These two! They move in synchronous orbit around the enclosure, never more than a foot apart. If it can be said that a rooster struts, Roscoe does, and content Hazel has taken to laying an egg every day.
So, just like that, with a swish of his speckled white tail feathers, in the closing chapters of his life, Roscoe went looking for love.
And he found it.