The Square Chicken

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The Square Chicken - Mr. Everton, of upstate Vermont (USA). was long in the business of being a chicken farmer - or, as he liked to describe it - a rancher of egg-laying-critters. He was most proud of one of his birds. It was a "derived bird" as Everton liked to call it. What he meant by that was mostly difficult to tell, but the bird about which he loved to brag was truly unlike any of his other chickens. As Everton told the story, in an honest poker game he had won the egg from which his special bird emerged. Everton usually described the circumstances of his acquiring this critter as having gotten it as a square deal sort of thing, and poker games in which the deals are square deals are most rare. So, too, was Everton's favorite chicken. It was a square bird. If you watched it as it made its way around the chicken yard, you would see this chicken trot its way down a straight line for a while as it pecked the ground for a kernel of dried corn or, perhaps, an unlucky bug . When the chicken tired of heading that way it would pivot sharply to the left or to the right in a perfect right angle, and off it would trot straight down another line. That chicken did everything at right angles. Yes. Everton's special chicken was a square chicken. The square chicken never did give birth to any children chickens. Having the right kind of eggs was just not possible. As everyone knows, chicken nests, like those of most birds, are round. Everton's square chicken had square eggs. The one consolation Everton had over this sad situation was that he and his chicken ranch - and his square chicken, too - gave rise to the widespread old saying tied to Everton's chicken being so infertile. "You cannot put a square egg into a round nest." * * * * * * * * * * Image source: Square chicken from Pixabay dot com and Edit by Gus Kilthau * * * * * * * * * *