A Bird in the Trailer is Worth........?

     My husband owns his own business which involves traveling all over the countryside bidding and contracting work at people's homes.  He has seen and heard it all!  Some of my best stories for this blog have come from experiences that he has had in dealing with rural people.
     He often has to deal with rural animals.  Most country dwellers have some kind of animal on their property.  He is usually greeted by some kind of guard dog and often has to wait for the owner to arrive and call off the attacker.  At one job, there was a dog that incessantly stole pieces of aluminum from his trailer and then would attempt to eat it.  The owner was right there and after several episodes of extracting slimy pieces of aluminum from the choking dog's throat, he finally took the animal inside. 

     My husband was also working on a barn a few years ago.  It was a rather large barn....in a field....with some cows.....and a bull.   He and his employee kept as quiet as possible, and as high off the ground as they could while they worked.  Every once in a while they would hear it pawing the ground or snorting very loudly.  I think they broke the seamless gutter install speed record that day.

    This week they experienced a new animal work hazard. They had stopped first thing in the morning to bid on a job in a rural area.  After bidding the first job, they shut up the trailer and headed to the next job about 30 miles away.  They arrived, greeted the owner of the house (and his dog) and opened up the trailer and proceeded to set up their tools.  They suddenly heard the owner shouting, "CHICKEN!!  GET IT OR SHE'LL KILL IT!!!"  They looked up to see a chicken flapping around the yard being chased by the home owner's dog, who was being chased by the frantic homeowner.

 

     Of course, the dog caught the chicken.  The homeowner was incredulous. No one in his neighborhood owned chickens. My husband quickly assured him that he did not keep chickens either.  After speculating, they remembered that there had been chickens at the house they bid that morning.  Obviously, a curious hen saw the open trailer with many nice spots to roost in out of the weather and made herself right at home.  She then proceeded to travel about 30 miles in the pitch dark, then, when she saw daylight again, headed out of the trailer, only to meet her fate. 

    We unfortunately had to change the sign on the trailer that read: "4,547 days without a work related casualty"...............but you'll get that in a small town.