Eenie and Moe

We kept eight hens in the yard behind the house. My son named two of them Eenie and Moe — he was three when they arrived, and those were the two he could tell apart.

They were his. He'd carry them around the yard with their legs dangling, narrating their opinions in a voice he invented for them. Eenie was the bold one. Moe followed her everywhere and complained about it the whole way.

A family of raccoons got into the coop in the middle of the night. By the time I got out there with a flashlight it was already over.

Eenie and Moe didn't make it.

He took it harder than I was ready for. It was his first real loss, and there was no version of that morning I could fix for him — no explanation that made it land any softer. He just kept asking me the same thing, over and over, the way kids do when they're trying to find a door out of it:

“How many chickens would it have taken?”

I didn't know. Nobody knows. It isn't the kind of question that has an answer sitting around waiting for you.

But I'm a nerdy dad who writes code at the kitchen table, and it turns out that when your kid asks you an impossible question, you can either say “I don't know” or you can spend a few weeks building the machine that finds out. So that's what this is.

Every bird in here fights like a real bird. The hens are brave and outmatched. The roosters have spurs and know how to use them. The raccoons are quick and clever and they do not lose to small numbers. Nothing is rigged in the flock's favour, because a rigged answer wouldn't have meant anything to him.

Somewhere in those numbers is the flock that would have been enough. He found it on a Sunday afternoon, sitting on my lap, and he laughed for the first time in about a week.

The rest of the hens are fine, by the way. The coop has a proper latch now, and a light on a sensor. We're getting two more in the spring. He's already picked the names.

— for Eenie and Moe

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