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The Hobby Farmer
It seemed to me that all the great adventures had gone out of the world, so a week after my wife left me I packed up everything I had and moved to Oklahoma. I had never  been to Oklahoma before, or farmed in any manner of speaking, but I decided if this wasgoing to be a true adventure I’d better do something right for a change and bought an oldfarm on a dry, windy piece of land.The first stock I purchased for my farm was chickens. Back in Ohio I had never really felt an urge to own poultry, but after the chickens arrived in the back of a big semi-truck I started getting attached to the little featherheads. The way they walked around pecking at the bare ground for hours seemed very optimistic to me and I appreciated that, being somewhat in a funk over my wife’s desertion. The only problem was the chickensran riot over the place, unchecked, so I asked around in town and got the number of afellow everyone said was a natural born chicken handler, the best in Oklahoma.
 
The Hobby Farmer 
The handler showed up the day after I called him in an old white pick-up truck that was riddled with rust, some of the holes in it as big as medium-sized pizzas. He hadtwo sleek looking border collies in the bed of his truck, their tongues drooling with theJune heat. The handler was a stocky Mexican guy with a round, solemn face and round brown eyes. Despite the heat, he was dressed in construction boots, blue jeans, and a blue and green flannel shirt. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his shirtsleeve.“Are you the man who wanted help with his chickens?”“Yes,” I said. “Are you Panza?”“Yes.” Panza whistled and the collies leapt out of the truck bed, lickety-split.“The gray one is Lupe, the brown one Charlie.”“Charlie,” I said. “That’s a good name.”“Yes,” Panza said, shading his eyes with a plump, brown hand. “It is.”We looked over the farm together. First up was a faded red barn that smelled likeold straw. I liked the way my new cowboy boots clicked across the concrete floor as Iwalked through the barn. Panza nodded at all the open space. “Good,” he said. Weheaded over to the chicken coop next, Lupe and Charlie at our heels as if they thought weneeded herding ourselves. The chicken coop was a small, one-story building that musthave been a visitor’s cottage during the farm’s long ago glory days. I had already put awire perimeter fence around the coop, setting it thirty yards back from the old cottage togive the chickens plenty of room to roam.“Free range,” Panza said, nodding at the chickens too stupid to stay inside thecottage and out of the afternoon heat. “It’ll make them tougher to eat.”2
 
The Hobby Farmer 
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m really only interested in eggs, anyhow. We can tell people the chickens have a good life, free to run about as they please. We’ll call themethically produced eggs.”Panza scratched his head. “You just moved to Oklahoma?”“Yes, sir,” I said. “From Ohio.”“You never farmed before?”I wiped my palms on my new, still stiff blue jeans. “No, sir. I used to sellelectronics, but I sold the business last month and decided to retire early.”Panza scratched Lupe behind his ears, still looking the coop over.“You’re not going to make much money selling eggs.”“That’s okay. I just don’t want to lose much.”“Are you going to farm anything else? Cows, hogs?”I pulled my baseball cap closer over my eyes, trying to fight the white glare beaming down from the sky. “Maybe later I’ll get more stock. I’m going to see how thechickens take, then go from there.”Panza walked up to the perimeter fence and unlatched the wire gate. Inside thefence about a dozen chickens pecked around in the dirt, though you couldn’t see any feedremaining on the ground. Panza whistled and Lupe and Charlie ran inside the fence. Thedogs started barking and within seconds they had the chickens rounded up in a cluckingherd, the dogs corralling all of them back into the coop. Panza whistled again and the border collies returned, jumping the fence instead of going through the open gate. Ismiled as the handler petted his dogs.3
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