The Mysterious Eggs

There was a contest in Backyard Poultry Magazine this summer to write a mystery story about the mascot of the magazine, Gertrude McCluck.
3 of my kids entered and we found out today that Aslan came in first place!
He wins a year subscription, a stuffed chicken and a book on chickens. Woo Hoo!!

Here is the winning story...his teacher is very proud of him!!


The Mysterious Eggs

Hi! This is Gertrude McCluck, and I’m going to tell you about the most unusual
thing that has ever happened here. The day it started was most usual: usual food, usual
bigoted crowing roosters, and the usual need to lay an egg. “What else could be
UNusual?” you might be thinking, “after all, chickens don’t do much, do they?” Well, you
overlooked one detail: Chickens take baths. Not in water, but in dirt, and this is exactly
where the unusualness starts.

On that most unusual usual day, I was taking a dust bath with one of my hen
friends, a White Leghorn named Thelma, who is just plain normal except for being
easily flustered and having a wild imagination. We were trying out this bathing spot near
the creek that runs close to our place. All of a sudden, Thelma scratches up some of the
weirdest things! They were kinda leathery, ovalish, and the size of a goose egg.
“MAYBE THEY’RE ALIEN SPACE CAPSULES!” Thelma said excitedly.
“Thelma, they look like eggs,” I said in my calm, usual voice.
“We should try hatching them, to see what comes out.” Thelma decided.
“Who’s we?” I asked. “It’s your idea.”
“Well, it’s the least we can do for scratching them out of the ground,” she argued.

I relented, so we cleared all the dirt from around the eggs, and Thelma sat on
them. Somehow, it became my job to bring scratch from the coop for her to eat.
Well, after three weeks, those eggs didn’t hatch, and Thelma was tired of the
whole ordeal. Don’t be too hard on her, though, since chicken minds are programmed
for only three weeks. But she didn’t want to let the eggs die, so we asked a Muscovy
duck who was broody to set on them. Five weeks later, the Muscovy’s ducklings
hatched out, and those eggs STILL didn’t pip!

So, being the faithful friend that I am, I promised to sit on them for two weeks,
even though I thought it useless. One week later, nothing. But on the ninth day,
something came out!

They were thirteen of the weirdest birds you ever did see. They had four legs, no
feathers whatsoever, a long, scaly beak (if it was a beak!) and a snake-like tail. They
were all black with yellowish stripes, and had a taste for toes and anything else that
crawled. Thelma was horrified and pleaded with me to take them back to the creek.
Needless to say, I was relieved, and we promptly brought them back. While we were
watching them swim away, I saw another one of them, but it was gray and twenty feet
long!
Thelma said, “Goodness! We’ve hatched thirteen ALLIGATORS!!!”
We scuttled out of there as fast as we could, and never dust-bathed near the
creek again!