Emu mu here, and emu mu there.....

The emus have arrived!  They are gangly, curious, hungry, and strange. The more time I spend with them, the more I like having them around, though their arrival was not without its low points.  I should have known when the owner pulled up at 3 a.m. that it was going to be an interesting morning, but as I shoved my feet into my boots and stumbled out to the truck, I grinned intstead of gritting my teeth.

 It happened to be market morning, so Luz and Memo had to head out around 4:30.  The kids have to get ready for school and leave the house by 5:45, so it ended up falling to me and the man who was selling us the emus to transport them to the pen.  I stood in pitch dark swooning in my usual way at the stars and pausing only when a bouncing headlamp that occasionally told me another emu was on its way.  As Steven brought the emu to the gate, I swiftly pulled off the pillowcase we used to hood them and opened the pen to usher them in.  The next to last emu, however, decided that she had different plans.  About halfway down the path to the pen, she bolted.  Head covered, she crashed through the brush and into the wide creek that runs alongside the Chinchilla home.  Steven and I chased her across the creek, into the woods, back into the creek, and into a nearby cow pasture before losing sight of her. At some point during all this mess, she managed to rip off the pillowcase, thank goodness.  It was now blushing dawn on the farm, and my chores were calling.  We decided to let the emu calm down a little in the pasture before trying to catch her again, and I ran off to care for the hens and get my littlest host sister ready for school. 

As I swept up the last of the rice from breakfast, I heard the hens screeching.  Not good – you shouldn’t be able to hear the hens from the kitchen.  Was it a skunk again?  I did not want to kill a skunk.  I arrived at the hen house, machete in hand, to find that the emu had found her way across the farm and was circling the hen house.  I couldn´t help but laugh – I imagine that for the hens, it was like seeing the Jolly Green Giant.  So began another hour of emu hunting.  At one point, as we followed her down the road to town, I looked over at Steven. “Never in my whole life would I have believed I’d be chasing an emu down the road at 8 o’clock in the morning.”

Many detours and fence-scramblings later, we finally got Pinot into the pen.  She still looks at me like she doesn’t trust me, and I return the look with gusto. I can’t help believing that she liked how helpless we were chasing her, after being cooped up so long on the truck.

p.s. The title of this post is lovingly dedicated to Johnald. :)