First Monday and the Banty Rooster

When I was young I was introduced to a local tradition that still flourishes in North Alabama. The town of Scottsboro, Alabama had First Monday the first Monday of every month. It was a trade day that was held on the square of the town and surrounding areas. They had one every month but the biggest one of the year was on Labor Day weekend when it turned into a three day event culminating on Monday.

First Monday was a trade day in the truest since of the word. Although you could buy things there as well as time went on it was a barter system event. You could literally trade anything at First Monday in those days. People traded livestock, farm implements, guns, vegetables, toys, and literally almost anything else you could think of at that time. Scottsboro was a short drive from Huntsville and from Fayetteville, Tennessee where we later moved. After we moved to the farm we did more barter trading as we came into possession of some things we couldn't sell easily and had more need of things that other people felt the same way about.

One of my earliest remembrances of First Monday was trading a pair of worn out roller skates for a pocket knife. It was that kind of place. Anything you had that someone else might value could be traded for something of similar value. On this particular year dad had me help him load up a rusty old harrow that had come with the place. Since we didn't have a tractor that it would hitch too it was useless to us but he thought he might be able to find someone who could use it in Scottsboro. I took a box of old baseball cards to trade for a hunting knife if I could fine one I liked.

We got up early that Monday morning and took off on the drive down to Scottsboro which was about an hour and a half away from the farm. It was chilly and wet that morning as we climbed into the old Datsun truck we were currently using. The Datsun was a compromise between needing a truck that was dependable and something for my dad to drive the 35 miles to work every day that wasn't too bad on gas mileage. The truck was a 1972 Datsun and dependable only if you discounted the fact that we had to work on it every other week to keep it running. In those days the small Japanese trucks were built for hauling supplies. They were so lightweight and thin bodied for mileage that they rode like a buckboard wagon. The suspension was very stiff so that it rode ok with a load on the back but if it was empty it almost bounced up into the air every time you hit a bump in the road.

It had a catchall compartment under the glove box that contained everything from flashlights that didn't work well to fence post staples and the nuts and bolts left over from it's latest repair job. Naturally, every time you hit a bump something fell out of it and rattled around on metal floorboard. If you weren't careful, whatever the loose article was would bounce or roll around until it found one of the rusted out holes in the floorboard and fall under the truck. Dropping steel nuts out onto the road at 65 mph tended to make them into projectiles that hit cars behind us or bounced up into the exposed drive shaft and spun out the sides of the truck at high velocity. Dad frowned on both of these eventualities so it was my job to catch anything that bounced into the floorboard before it could find its way out of the holes.

As we left that morning I was hopeful that harrow in the back was heavy enough to smooth out the ride but I soon was disappointed on that measure. We didn't talk a whole lot on the way down except for him questioning why I would need a new hunting knife as I already had one that I had bought the year before. I explained that the blade wasn't really heavy enough to cut a squirrels head off. My dad had taught me and my brother how to clean squirrels when we first started hunting. It was a quick and easy process that first involved cutting their feet and head off. Once that is accomplished you simply cut a little notch in the fur of their middle back large enough to get two fingers in and pull the skin in opposite directions with one finger of both hands. The skin would split and come off very quickly and easily, leaving the meat exposed so that you could then gut the squirrel. It was a quick process which we perfected over many years of hunting squirrels before school. We could clean five of six squirrels in just a few minutes, after which the meat went in the deep freeze in the back room. I explained that I needed a heavier blade so I could chop rather than sawing the head off and he accepted that as good sense.

Dad told me he was going to trade the harrow on potatos and a couple of banty chickens for my mother. We had a yard full of chickens but she had been wanting some banties for quite a while. A banty chicken is almost a miniature chicken. They grow to about half the size of regular chickens and are more adapted to living on their own than most chickens. They forage more widely and eat mostly insects, worms, and grubs. Our yard chickens did that too but they also needed corn and chicken feed to stay healthy. I didn't know a lot about banties but I had often heard mother talking about wanting to have a few of them.

As it turned out the trades went very well that day. I got a heavy bowie knife with a bone handle that needed a lot of sharpening for my box of baseball cards and a small penknife I had traded for at school. My dad traded the harrow for 500 pounds of potatos, 2 banty hens, and a banty rooster. The banties came with their own little wooden crate which we put in the back of the truck with the two large burlap bags of potatos. Dad explained on the way home that we would put the potatos in the old horse trailer behind the house. We would spread them out on the floor and cover them with lime so that they wouldn't rot or sprout too many eyes. He expected it would supply our family with potatos for upwards of a year.

We made it back home well before dark. He and I unloaded the potatos into the old horse trailer and spread them out with a good covering of lime on the floor of the trailer. When mother came out to check on us he showed her the banties in the crate in the back of the truck. She was really tickled about the banties but wondered out loud how the rooster would get on with the big boss rooster of the yard. At that time we had White Leggun chickens. We probably had 20 or so chickens with a couple of mix Rhode Island Reds thrown in and several roosters of varying size. The boss rooster ruled the yard and the other roosters had to steer clear of him and his hens or catch his wrath which usually involved a couple of spurring jousts and a chase around the yard.

Roosters have a natural tendency to fight other roosters. It is a territorial thing and with the exception of game roosters usually involves a few jousts wherein they fly up and try to hit each other with the spurs that grow on their feet. The spurs are quite nasty little pieces of hard cartlidge that have a sharp point on them. They can easily pierce bare skin and roosters have enough strength in their legs to make it quite painful when they spur you. The boss rooster depends on bluff and constant reminder so their is seldom a serious contest amongst them that lasts very long. Occasionally a young rooster overtakes the old boss and establishes dominance but it is dominance it is after and not bloodlust.

As I was to find out later, game roosters have a whole different attitude. They will fight to the death and have to be kept completely seperated accordingly. Domestic roosters like those we had didn't usually actually hurt each other before one established dominance. I hadn't thought about the banty rooster and how he would fit in with the boss rooster but I knew they had quite a reputation for feistiness.

We knew they would have to sort things out themselves but weren't too worried about it until we let the banties out of the cage. The banty rooster immediately and without delay attacked one of the smaller roosters and chase him around the yard. This went on for a few minutes until the boss rooster saw what was going on and came over the check things out. The banty rooster immediately attacked him as well. The boss rooster was probably 8 inches taller and double the weight of the banty but that didn't seem to register with the banty. They went at it for quite a while until both of them were bloodied and panting for breath. I think the banty got the worst of it simply because the boss rooster had bigger spurs but when they parted company neither one seemed to want any more of the other one.

The banty rooster took his two hens and moved up behind the barn. The boss rooster would run at him after that if he came too close to the yard but he suddenly had no interest in visiting behind the barn either. It was kind of an agreeable detente for both of them. The banties slept in the barn loft and stayed off to themselves for the most part. We eventually had quite a few banties as they hatched chicks every so often and were quite independent and a little wild. They had the run of the barn lot and the hog pen and the other chickens basically stayed away from those areas from that point onwards.

I thought that was probably the end of things for the banty rooster and the yard roosters but he proved to have a long and unforgiving memory. The chickens were around for eggs but they also were around for chicken dinner every so often. It was my job to kill and clean the chickens when it was time for chicken dinner and that happened pretty often around our place since it was relatively free as far as meat goes.

There are many ways to kill a chicken including simply wringing their neck but I felt like it was impossible to do that without them suffering more than was necessary. My method was to simply chop their heads off and I kept a hatchet in an old piece of a telephone pole beside the barn for that reason. The roosters knew enough to know that me taking them up behind the barn carrying them by their legs wasn't a good thing and they would squawk quite a bit on that short journey.

When you chop a chickens head off they will usually flop around for a few seconds which can make quite a mess on your clothes of you stand too close. My way around this was to simply toss them into the weeds beside the old telephone pole until they quit flopping around. One evening shortly after the arrival of the banties, mother told me to go kill a chicken for dinner that night. I took a scoop of corn and threw it out and grabbed the first rooster I could catch while they were eating.

As I carried him up behind the barn he squawked very loudly, plainly not too happy with whatever was coming next. All the squawking brought the banty rooster around the barn to investigate as we were in his territory when I got to the pole. He stood off to the side and watched as I layed the roosters neck across the pole and quickly chopped his head off, tossing him into the weeds immediately afterwards.

That was when I learned that the banty had a long memory. He immediately ran over and began furiously flogging the dead chicken. Every time it flopped a little he would flog it some more. When the dead rooster finally quit moving and was still the banty scratched and strutted all around; finally climbing up on the pole and crowing furiously. This became something of a routine whenever I killed a rooster. The banty would hear them squawking and come from wherever he was as fast as his legs and wings would bring him. He got his revenge on a lot of roosters before I grew up and moved out on my own.

I didn't tell mother about it because I knew she wouldn't approve but I figured it wasn't hurting the dead roosters and he seemed to get quite a kick out of it. If you ever hear the expression "proud as a banty rooster" it has to do with the way they strut and carry on as if there isn't anything they are afraid of. It turns out they also have a long and unforgiving memory.