Passage 6

My grandmother in Bacon County, Georgia, raised biddies: tiny cheeping bits of fluff that city folk allow their children to squeeze to death at Easter. But city children are not the only ones who love biddies; hawks love them, too. Hawks like to swoop into the yard and carry off one impaled on their curved talons. Perhaps my grandmother, in her secret heart, knew that hawks even then were approaching the time when they would be on the endangered species list. Whether she did or not, I’m sure she often felt she and her kind were already on the list. It would not do.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw her get rid of a hawk. Chickens, as everybody knows, are cannibals. Let a biddy get a spot of blood on it from a scrap or a raw place and the other biddies will simply eat it alive. My grandmother penned up all the biddies except the puniest one, already half pecked to death by the other cute little bits of fluff, and she set it out in the open yard by itself. First, though, she put arsenic on its head. I―about five years old and sucking on a sugar-tit—saw the hawk come in low over the fence, its red tail fanned, talons stretched, and nail the poisoned biddy where it squatted in the dust. The biddy never made a sound as it was carried away. My gentle grandmother watched it all with satisfaction before she let her other biddies out of the pen.

Another moment from my childhood that comes instantly to mind was about a chicken, too; a rooster. He was boss cock of the whole farm, a magnificent bird nearly two feet tall. At the base of a chicken’s throat is its craw, a kind of pouch into which the bird swallows food, as well as such things as grit, bits of rock and shell. For reasons I don’t understand they sometimes become craw-bound. The stuff in the craw does not move; it remains in the craw and swells and will ultimately cause death. That’s what would have happened to the rooster if the uncle who practically raised me hadn’t said one day: “Son, we got to fix him.”

He tied the rooster’s feet so we wouldn’t be spurred and took out his castrating knife, honed to a razor’s edge, and sterilized it over a little fire. He soaked a piece of fine fishing line and a needle in alcohol. I held the rooster on its back, a wing in each hand. With the knife my uncle split open the craw, cleaned it out, then sewed it up with the fishing line. The rooster screamed and screamed. But it lived to be cock of the walk again.

What’s the possible meaning of the word “biddies”(Paragraph 1)?

How did the author’s grandmother get rid of a hawk?

According to the passage, what’s the organ for a chicken to digest food?

Being “cock of the walk” means being a ________.

From the passage, we can infer ________.