The enemy is two-fold: foxes and mongooses which have made off with three of her nine chickens so far but have, quite wisely, elected to leave the vicious rooster alone. The chickens used to roost in a badly constructed coop mostly consisting of patched holes on more patched holes, which wouldn’t protect them from anything at all including, I must add, the vagaries of the weather. This ramshackle blimp has been acting as a meaty magnet for four-footed hunters who now, if they happen to stroll by as they undoubtedly do the very second Olive Oil nips inside for a thawing cup of tea, would find it completely empty as, for the sake of safety, the hens and raucous rooster have been upgraded into the relative warmth and comfort of the buffalo shed attached to Olive Oil’s living quarters. She loves that stinking buffalo almost as much as I loathe the damn thing!
After a very long ten days and nights of marching up and down and round and round and playing camouflage games in the bushes, Olive Oil is not, understandably, in the best of form. So when two of her hens, a stringy brown one and its dusty white companion, broke the rules of neighbourliness by venturing into the forbidden territory of my garden where they feasted on young broccoli plants before the dogs raised the alarm along with a huge cloud of bloodied feathers, it was with some trepidation that I ventured to return one hen intact and the other hen minus half a wing and all its feathers. The blatantly obvious fact that the hens had demolished my well-tended, mouthwateringly anticipated broccoli didn’t mean zip to Olive Oil. She completely freaked out at the sight of her partially plucked criminal and, as anticipated, went completely ballistic, zooming first around the Moon, then Mars, then Saturn, before coming back to Earth with a bump when I suggested it might have been better if I’d just kept quiet about the incident, finished plucking the chicken and cooked it as, after all, it was already stuffed with my broccoli. This seemed to do the trick and after flinging the unharmed hen in to the dark recesses of the buffalo shed, she retreated into her house with the traumatised bird tenderly enfolded in her arms. It would recover once it got over the shock of almost becoming Hell-Bella’s dinner. Hell-Bella, by the way, is the half-trained puppy who recently joined the menagerie and who was beaming in self-satisfied pride from the adrenalin rush of her almost-but-not-quite, first kill.
Hyped up to hell and back, there was only one way to calm Hell-Bella and myself down: a good long walk. Our walks usually incorporate further training, from “walk” to “heel,” “don’t eat the lead,” “sit still while I pick some rosehips and don’t eat whatever that gunge happens to be just because it’s lying there.” Off we went leaving three fully trained adult dogs at home to guard against further intruders of any kind.
It was yet another glorious early winter day: brilliant blue skies, yellow, orange and crimson leaves lingering on deciduous trees, the resinous aroma of pine cones wafting up from what is left of the evergreen forest, the google-bop, google-bop of a noisy Tree Pie objecting to me harvesting the wild rosehips it wanted to eat, although I never pick them all. All was well in this mountain world until I strolled around a corner towards what I have also thought of as the ‘Hansel and Gretel’ house, decorated as all its edges are, with beautifully carved and brightly painted wooden ornamentation in the old traditional style.
The house was still there but it was difficult to see it as it was surrounded by earth moving equipment and a gang of workers wielding shovels and why, (and this is something I’ve always wondered), does it take two Pakistanis to use a one-man shovel?
Between the house and the rough track where I was walking, was, the operative word being ‘was’, a neglected field. The field was reasonably level, which is extremely unusual up here. I’d always hoped the field would be brought back into cultivation at some point. I used to harbour a dream of seeing all neglected land in this area being used to produce wonderfully nutritious crops of grain and vegetables and I had erroneously hoped that as prices of essential eatables continued to rocket, people would be forced to resort to growing food for their own homes at least. This dream is not a tenable one, at least for the foreseeable future, as people have other, easier options like becoming highwaymen or doing what the owner of this particular field has done - sell out to the highest bidder. This green field, in which birds foraged and, in spring, wild tulips bloomed, has been bulldozed- the topsoil removed to expose painfully bleeding red earth with plots outlined in chunna. A workman told me the field was being readied for ‘a holiday development.’ The type of development we could expect to see sprout up, either bungalows or apartment blocs, no doubt depended on investment in the project which boasts a spectacular if bitterly cold view northwards towards Nathia Gali and Mukshpuri. It is yet another nail in the coffin for the Bhurban area where largely illegal constructions mushroom on an almost daily basis. Some of these monstrosities have been partly demolished by the authorities for contravening local planning laws but it is also true that the majority of recognised illegal constructions that have fallen prey to the demolition hammer are immediately adjacent to the main road and belong to ‘outsiders’. Constructions off the main road, classified as ‘out of sight so out of mind’ are generally ignored or, if warnings are issued, cash changes hands and that, unfortunately, is that. The mountainsides, especially those with drivable access roads or tracks, are disappearing under cement at a horrifying rate. What with most of the locals following the trend of selling off yet another piece of land in order to remain solvent, its won’t be long before they have nothing left to sell, no regular form of income and nowhere left to grow the food they need and it will damn well serve them right!
Going for a relaxing walk didn’t turn out as planned, although a basket of rosehips was carefully harvested and will be sunned daily until the hips are totally dry and ready for airtight storage with handfuls being taken out at intervals and boiled up in water to make a vitamin-rich winter tea.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 12th, 2010.
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