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Back in the day, our village was a dusty place with no bitumen road. The area was surrounded by thick bush. One day as I was grazing the goats in August during holidays in a field a distance away, a hawk flew by and landed in a bush.
It was carrying another bird which I believed to be a guinea fowl. I rushed to the bush where it landed to chase it off and keep the tasty bird for myself.
Once I scared it off, I quickly realized it was a spotted chicken with black and grey feathers. It had been badly injured with deep wounds on its back and its crown was torn to pieces.
I took the bird fully intending to eat it before it died. Before I could light a fire with the boys and begin plucking it, I realized it was the biggest chicken I had ever seen.
Our village chicken were tiny in comparison. There’s a special breed of local chicken that used to be around before improved kienyeji that was tiny, hardy, and barely had meat on it.
A thought struck me and I decided to keep the chicken. I carried it home and laid it in a small chicken coup in the village kitchen just above the goat pen, where it was warm.
Over the next few weeks I fed it a diet of store bought food from my meager earnings doing odd jobs and the occasional shilingi ya kuokota. (Wakati wa moi finding money on the road was common)
I dressed it’s wounds with sap from aloe vera I collected in the bush. After about one week it laid it’s first egg. The egg was a marvel as no one in my village had ever seen such a massive egg, it was easily twice the size if village eggs.
Another idea struck me. I borrowed one of the bigger cocks from the home kienyeji chickens a put it in there.
From that day I would carefully check the coup every morning and collect the eggs.
After about two weeks it got broody, and I threw out the cockerel.
It had lad ten eggs at this point and I gave her nine of them, remembering the first one it laid was not fertile.
It hatched six and threw out three. By easter the next year, when I was in class six, my first batch of two big cocks had matured. I sold them at three times the price of the village cocks. A few months later, my big eggs were hotcake.
And that’s how I Became the village chicken dealer. A bigman bazoo with the biggest breed of birds that fell from the sky.
I still see my breed when I visit the village. But they look significantly smaller than the improved kienyejis. Although they are hardier and have survived numerous outbreaks that easily knock out the improved kienyejis