h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm probably going to regret asking... But I really really want to hear this tale!

I was maybe three or four, and I was walking around behind my house, and I saw the biggest bird I had ever seen. I was so frightened that I ran inside.

In retrospect, I think it was a chicken. It might not have been all that big, but I was so small. Could it have been a turkey? Maybe.

Well that was a disappointingly normal answer!

Don't suppose it resembled Tilda Swinton?

Henry Travers? He had a bit of a roostery look about him..

I had a boring childhood. I was disappointed in it,too.

Nothing boring about Angelic chickens mate!

This chicken was definitely not boring. Nowadays there are wild turkeys in the neighborhood.I fact, they are in every neighborhood that any of my relatives live in.

Did you hear a bell ringing when the chicken appeared by any chance?

No.

Wait, I think I heard some kind of noise, which made it even more terrifying. What's funny is that there were no neighbors who might have had chickens. I still have no clue where it came from, and it seems so preposterous that I wonder if I hallucinated it.

(I didn't tell my family. I don't know why. Maybe I didn't want them to think I wasn't brave enough to face a big bird?)

If you put chicken and angel into Google translate, they look very similar in Hebrew... Or was it aramaic?

Some say angels communicate by electro magnetic frequencies, causing a ringing sound in human ears, I had tinnitus working in a shipyard, nothing bloody heavenly about that!

Wondering how chickens communicate now, if that clucking I'd electromagnetic, maybe we're onto a scoop mate!

Cfickens are rarely quiet for long.

I think this one gave out a "rebel yell" as if *I* was the one to be afraid of, and the chicken was warning any other chickens that might have been in the area.

This happened almost 79 years ago, and I'm trying to reconstruct my memories of what happened.....

I had a very vivid memory of the sound of high heels on a rainy pavement from 50 years ago last night.

I had a dream about a very nice galactic traveller who turned out to be a cybernetic being designed by benevolent genius aliens bent on helping everyone else. His talking spaceship turned out to be a projection that could dissolve and be reabsorbed into him at will. She had a lovely voice.

Of course, this was all theological...

Anyway, if you're sure there were no chicken-raising neighbours, and you were that little, could it have been a wild turkey or a pheasant, or something like that? I don't think you would have mistaken a turkey buzzard for a chicken, hm...

It probably *was* a wild turkey, though no one in the neighborhood saw any And from 1871 to 1970, no wild turkeys were known in the state. Then 37 wild ones were reintroduced, and their numbers have grown a lot since then.

Probably a neighbor had at least one chicken, but wasn't letting it be well-known, at least to us. Plus, a family two or three miles away raised eggs. I don't know when they started, though. A chicken could conceivably travel that far. It would have been travelling roughly southeast, toward the sun.

I've never heard of a chicken straying that far, but who knows? But wildlife people are always claiming something's not in the state when people see it. This argument always rages about panthers. 'Are you sure it wasn't a housecat?' 'Not unless there's a housecat the size of my VW.'

We get wild turkeys everywhere here. One broke my brother-in-law's side mirror on his pickup as it flew by. Didn't hurt the turkey, apparently.

On another note, while I was researching the Brookville book, I found a story about a 7-year-old boy. They'd just moved out into the wilds. And he ran into the house to tell his mother that he'd just seen the weirdest-looking donkey in the world. It had really skinny legs and...

He'd just seen his first deer.

The chicken seemed to be coming *from* the southeast, not toward it. There was a working farm less than half a mile away. I'll bet that's where it came from.

I was four or five, and didn't get out much. I didn't know who had what. I probably knew what a chicken looked like, though. I'm 90% certain it was a chicken. Right feathers, right coloring, just apparently a bit on the big side.

I can find pictures of giant white chickens, but out of respect for FWR, I won't give a link. No, H2G2 doesn't have this material. Can you imagine?

Hoggetts have some very large chickens. They might look enormous to a child.

See, this was my point all along. I was small even for my age, and I was in a veritable wilderness. Just thirty feet in back of my house was this big, scary forest, and I wasn't used to it yet. Chickens by nature are always doing something, usually accompanied by noise. They are not placid!