The true story of an unlikely farmer.

Antonia Murphy is an award-winning journalist who moved from San Francisco to New Zealand with her husband- having a complete life change. Her first book ‘Dirty Chick’ was published in January of 2015. Here, she writes about living with a very lonely chook.

By ANTONIA MURPHEY

It wasn’t even my chicken, actually, but my father’s which I was charged with caring for during the three weeks he went on holiday in France with his wife Gail. This particular chore came with free use of his Spanish- style hacienda with a swimming pool just north of San Francisco, so I was more than happy to oblige. Besides the handful of chickens, there was an elderly cat, an idiot bulldog, and a duck. Nothing I thought I couldn’t handle. Plus, I didn’t have much else to do at the time. Browsing through life in my late twenties, I was managing a small children’s theatre and halfheartedly attending art school. My meagre paycheques added up to a spare existence based largely on peanut butter and toast, so a three- week house- sitting gig in a fancy neighbourhood sounded like just the thing. I packed my bags eagerly, anticipating lazy afternoons poolside.

“Quackers is bereaved,” my stepmother announced as she tucked. “He’s very lonely. He hasn’t been the same since Cheese died.”Cheese, apparently, was the female duck. “He’s lonely?” I asked. “How do you know?”She cringed. “Well, he sometimes has sex with the chickens. But it’s fine, really. He’s perfectly harmless. Just a lonely widower.” She smiled sentimentally. “Would you help me get this suitcase down-stairs?”And that’s how I met Quackers, the interspecies duck rapist.

Every time I went down to the chicken run, there he was, humping away at a chicken. I couldn’t make out the specifics of what was going on, but he’d be up on some poor hen, furiously flapping his wings, and she would look really perturbed. They’d scoot around like this for a minute or two— unless I happened to separate them, which wasn’t so easy to do.“Hey! You . . . duck! Stop it! Stop doing that!” Quackers ignored me. I decided it would be useless to appeal to his better nature and instead went for the garden hose. “How do you like that, Quackers?” I’d holler, placing my thumb over the aperture to get a high- pressure spray. This usually worked, and both duck and chicken would slink away, feathers soaked and ruffled, looking ashamed.The garden hose method was effective over the weekend, when I could lounge by the swimming pool and keep an eye on things. But come Monday, I had to go to work, and I scowled at Quackers on my way out the door. “Don’t try any funny business, Mister,” I warned him. “I’m watching you.”

This was a blatant lie, and Quackers must have known it, because when I got back that night the hacienda was eerily silent. “They must have put themselves to bed,” I reasoned, taking the flashlight off the shelf by the door and heading down to the chicken run. “I’m sure they’re all fine.”They were not. Or at least, one wasn’t. A single sweep of the flashlight told me all I needed to know. Feeder, watering can, chicken roost. Three little hens, all in a row. Also a small glass chandelier, because that’s how they do farming in Marin County. And one little hen, huddled up on a shelf, crouched in a way that instantly communicated something was wrong. I passed the flashlight beam over her backside, and that’s when I saw the blood. I ran for the telephone.“What do I do?”I said in a panic, after calling my then- boyfriend Peter at his job. “It’s bloody. It’s bleeding. I think Quackers raped it to death!”“It’s a chicken,” Peter reasoned. “Cut its head off.”“I can’t do that!” I squealed. “These chickens aren’t regular chickens! They’re pets!”And it was true: My dad and his wife had an unnatural attachment to their hens.

Besides outfitting their coop in faux Louis XVI décor, Dad and Gail sometimes let them wander around inside the house, where they crapped on the carpets and hassled the bulldog. One time, a framed painting fell down, breaking a chicken’s leg. They didn’t euthanise it. They took it to the vet and had its leg put in a sling.Peter’s voice was even and calm. “Then you don’t have a choice. You’ll have to find a vet who’s open and take her in.”And I guess you could say that’s when my farming career began. I never much cared for animals, unless delicious slices of them were seared in clarified butter and presented to me with a sauce. But now here I was, following my soon-to-be-husband’s advice: wrapping the gory chicken in a towel and speeding away to the all- night veterinary clinic.

Fumbling at the knobs on my dashboard, I found a Mozart minuet on the public radio station and turned it up, hoping the music would calm her.Once we got to the clinic, the chicken went downhill fast. “I don’t recommend keeping different species in the same enclosure,” the vet announced, after I’d been anxiously waiting in his front office for half an hour. “Especially ducks. Ducks are nothing but trouble.”I jumped to my feet. “Where is she? Can I see her?”Instead of a chicken, the doctor handed me a sheet of paper. It was an invoice with a single item. “Chicken euthanasia,” it read. “Cloacal trauma. $345.00.”“ Wait— what?” I asked, trying hard to be civil. “What’s a cloaca? And why does it cost three hundred and forty-five dollars to kill one?” The vet smiled benignly, murmuring something about after- hours care. And then he told me what a cloaca is.

Unlike human females, who have so many holes we might as well be pasta strainers, the chicken has one perfect, pristine opening, which handles everything. It’s her intestinal, urinary, and reproductive aperture. To put it simply, the cloaca is the chicken super-vagina.I have no idea how they control them. At any moment, this same hole could produce urine, a turd, or a baby chicken egg— a fact that, I imagine, must fill their lives with surprise.I think it was the knowledge of this elegant organ, much more than the sense of guilt I felt at not being there to protect her, that made me mourn the chicken. The cloaca is so beautifully efficient, such a miracle of avian engineering, that it seemed doubly tragic to think it had been defiled by a sadistic duck.

I got over it, though. My father and stepmother returned from their trip and they tried not to blame me for the death. I went back to my own home, which at that time was a sailboat moored in Richmond, a sketchy part of the Bay Area just east of Marin County. Slowly, I began to put the horrible incident behind me. But one day, I got to wondering about that duck and why his romantic advances had resulted in tragedy. So I Googled “duck penis,” and instantly regretted it.

The duck, I learned, has the longest penis of all vertebrates. When extended, his penis can reach the same size as his full body height, a terrifying ratio when you put it in human terms. The mental image this produced was unspeakable: a sort of Boschian tableau featuring a Satanic duck with a two-metre cock.

Later that week, Gail gave a memorial service for her ill- fated hen. It seems the chicken’s name had been Chantal and she’d been as cherished as a miracle baby after a lifetime of infertility. In a troubling blend of fetish and sentiment, Gail had kept the cracked remains of Chantal’s first egg over the years, lovingly wrapped in tissue paper.

These she placed in a spice jar and buried alongside the bird. Not surprisingly, my father and stepmother didn’t invite me to the wake. This may have been because I was responsible for Chantal’s death, or perhaps because my father and Gail had an inkling that I might start giggling at a eulogy for poultry. Whatever the reason, the proceedings went on without me.To be polite, I did ask about the service, and it seems things didn’t go exactly as planned. Gail was vague on the details, but generally, in a case of murder and sexual assault, the assailant is not permitted to free- range at the funeral, pecking at lawn chairs and searching for bugs in the grass. Quackers, however, had roamed the lawn, fixing everyone with a cold, hard stare.

Gail had selected a Shakespearean sonnet to read at the graveside, but no sooner had she begun than Quackers strode lustily forward, causing my father to rear back in alarm. This was a wise move, and he didn’t even know the specifics of duck anatomy. A duck penis isn’t just huge; it’s spiny and shaped like a corkscrew.

Clearly, species was no obstacle to this duck’s unnatural urges. Who would he fix on next? My father? The bulldog? Chantal’s recumbent corpse? The service came to an awkward conclusion, and Quackers was admonished for creeping people out. Soon after, the bulldog died under mysterious circumstances, and while Gail was convinced he’d snacked on a box of snail poison, I had my doubts. Quackers still roamed the property, terrifying cats and small children, while everyone was careful to keep him away from the hens. He died a year or two later, and though a decade has passed since that terrible night, I still can’t feed ducks at the park. “Rapists,” I mutter, whenever I see kids tossing bread in the duck pond. “Why feed your treats to the rapists?” This has won me some unkind looks from parents and nannies, but they should read up on their anatine anatomy. If they knew what they were feeding, they wouldn’t let their kids get so close.

I’d like to say this episode put me off rural living altogether, and for a while, it did. I certainly had no intention of hobby farming, even in the charming way my father and stepmother approached it. But our lives take unexpected turns. Somehow, within a few years, I was managing my own homestead in New Zealand, complete with chickens, goats, and even a few cows grazing in the pasture. The one animal I would not permit on my property was a duck. The very thought of one gave me the creeps.

If it seems strange that an artsy San Francisco dilettante should find herself living in a small rural backwater in northern New Zealand, then let me assure you, I’m as surprised as you are.

For the most part, our peers back home lead conventionally successful lives: in their early forties, they run businesses, work as lawyers and scientists, have mortgages, and go to restaurants and parties.

Meanwhile, Peter and I spend our time chasing cows down the road and executing chickens. After much thought, I ascribe our unconventional life choices to three main things: 1. The ocean 2. George W. Bush 3. Hobbits.

This extract has been published here with full permission from Text publishing. To read more of the book - please click here.

ANTONIA MURPHY is an award-winning magazine journalist, author and adventurer. A San Francisco native, she took off on her sailboat in 2005 and never came back. Today, she lives and works in Whangarei, New Zealand, with her husband Peter and their two children, Silas and Miranda. Antonia’s debut memoir, DIRTY CHICK: Adventures of an Unlikely Farmer will be published by Gotham Penguin (USA/Canada) and Text (Aus/NZ) in January, 2015.