Guinea Foul

This anecdote is perhaps best accompanied by the above video, which will give you an idea of the sounds, and the volume, which I regularly endure.

Last night I went out to close the gate leading to our single-lane dirt road, as I do every night, and I saw that one of the neighbor’s guinea fowl had got stuck on our side of the fence.  It was dashing frantically back and forth across the same ten-foot stretch of fence, making its desperate barking cry in hopes that its flock would somehow rescue it.  (I think of this noise as a “bark,” and I described it as “barking” in The Rift, only to be mocked by David Langford in his “Thog’s Master Class.”  So, class, how would you describe these noises?)

The thing is, if the guinea fowl had only dashed another fifteen feet to the left, it would have encountered the gate and simply been able to walk home.

So I tried to encourage it to move in that direction.  This involved me fighting my way through several branches of an apricot tree, only to have the terrified guinea dart around me and return to its original stretch of fence, barking in an ever-more-frenetic way.

Now the thing is, guinea fowl can fly.  Not brilliantly, but well enough.  The guinea could have flown up and over the fence any time it wanted, or rather, any time it remembered, through its terror, that it could actually fly.  Which it didn’t.

I decided to do something else for a while and hope the guinea found the big hole in the fence that I’d left open for it, but it never did, and the noise continued.

So I went out again, and once again thrashed through the apricot tree in hopes of moving the guinea to the gate.  Which I did, only to see the panic-stricken fowl run in panic right past the open gate and to another part of the fence, where it resumed its dashing back-and-forth routine.

By this time I was nearly helpless with laughter, and composing in my head a children’s book called The Guinea Fowl That Forgot to Fly.

My neighbor’s cute little button-eyed dog turned up at this point and stood in front of the gate and started to yap.  Normally it shows up just to chase my cat, but apparently the commotion attracted it.  I don’t know whether it was trying to guide the guinea back home, or just adding noise to the din for its own amusement.

At this point I was thinking that I should just maybe put the guinea fowl out of its misery, pluck it and cook it.  I had curried guinea fowl in London, maybe I could duplicate the recipe.  But if I did that, I know that my neighbor would walk out of his house at an inconvenient moment and see me slaughtering his bird, so I didn’t.

Besides, I was laughing so hard that I doubt I could have managed anything requiring physical coordination. I probably would have cut of my own thumb.

I arranged the leaves of the gate into a kind of chute to guide the guinea in the right direction, and started chasing it again.

The guinea ran frantically, encountered the gate, and was steered into the open road.  At which point it just stood there stunned for a while, staring at its home which was suddenly before it.  It ceased to cry, and its escort the cute button-eyed dog ceased to bark.  Both trotted home.  I closed the gate.

It— and several of its peers— are barking on my front lawn.  I wonder if it will remember the great big hole in the gate that it ran out last night, but somehow I doubt it.

Fly, guinea fowl, fly! You stoopid dinosaur.