Dawn of the Chickens [Chicken Run]

Chapter 1

One night, the moon shone on the English countryside, a barbed wire fence surrounded an ugly dusty yard in which sat several squat rows of huts. Under its pale moonlight, the place looked a bit like a wartime prison camp, but on an oddly smaller scale. A flashlight through its beam this way and that among the huts. It was held by a middle aged, pot bellied man. The man was making his evening rounds, checking the perimeter of the yard accompanied by two large black menacing guard dogs. The dogs had metal spikes sticking out of their collars. After checking the huge padlock on the gate, he moved on. When he had gone, a silhouetted figure emerged from behind one of the huts and peeked from one corner of another hut.

Stealthily, the figure dashed across the yard to the fence, her feet crunching the dusty ground. She leaned against the fence for a moment, breathing hard and then produced a spoon. The man heard something and turned to see where it was, but there was no sign of her. He thought he heard someone digging but he knew it was all in his head. He continued on. Once he's gone, the figure resumed digging. After a few minutes of digging madly, she had made a hole at the base of the fence, big enough to squeeze through. She scrambled under the fence and dashed for the cover of a building, leaping behind it just as the flashlight beam panned past. Phew. Safe.

She looked back behind the barrels and gave the okay sign to six others, who were anxiously waiting there, heads poking out from behind a hut. Scambering to the fence, they tried to crawl under. Unfortunately, the largest one wedged halfway through and she could not make it out of the fence. Her friend, with help from the others, now tried pushing from behind. The figure hurried over and pulled from the front. The large one was struggling frantically, beginning to panic.

Suddenly, the youngest one, a small pastel yellow figure shouted to pull her back. Looking up, she saw that the farmer had found her and was already sticking the barking lunging dogs on her. The figure shoved her friend back and then ran for her life. Another dog rounded the corner and joined the others charging her. She ran up the steps of the farmhouse and back towards the door as the dog stalked her, snarling. She tried to defend herself, something that can stall time. She grabbed a gnome to whack it away but however, the dog bit into it, breaking the plaster and shards. She backed away slowly until the farmhouse door opened instantly, causing the dogs to stop snarling and cower in terror.

The figure spun around to find herself staring into the heart stopping face of... the dreaded Mrs. Tweedy. Mrs. Tweedy scourged the chicken farm, even though the farm had been in Mr. Tweety's family for generations. Her husband simply did her bidding and tried to stay out of trouble, if he wasn't such a great spineless lump to his wife.

"Mr. Tweedy," she demanded her husband. "What is that chicken doing outside the fence?"

"Oh.. I don't know, love. I... " Mr. Tweety stammered.

"Just deal with it, now," barked Mrs. Tweedy.

"Yes, love." Blam! Mrs. Tweedy slammed the door.

After she's inside, Mr. Tweedy scowls at the chicken. Once again, for the thousandth time, she'd made him look stupid. Well, could that help it if he was stupid and blamed it on a chicken? Without saying a word, Mr. Tweedy scooped her up by the neck and carried her across the dusty yard to an old coal bunker near the side of the barn. "I'll teach you to make a fool of me," he muttered as he trudged along. He threw her inside the bunker, slammed it closed and then marched over to the fence. "Now let that be a lesson to the lot of you!" he shouted through at the rest of the chickens. "No chicken escapes from Tweedy's farm!" Mr. Tweedy turned on his heel and marched back to the house.

And that was that. Just another bad day for chickens at Tweety's farm. Just another round in the endless depressing game. Chickens try to escape, chickens get caught.

In the gloom of the cold bunker, the chicken marked off the days on the wall. She knew just what was happening to her friends outside. it was always the same. They sat cramped on their little nests in the chicken huts, pointing us to the relentless pressure to produce more eggs. And the pressure has gotten worse lately. Mrs Tweedy had been walking around with charts and graphs that showed that the egg yield was declining. She was never happy, but these days she appeared to be in an even more unpleasant state than usual. In the darkness of the poor bumper, the chicken wondered about what it all meant.

The cold bunker had just been a slight interruption in the chicken's campaign to break out of Tweedy's.

It wasn't fun to be in there, but as many times as she was thrown into it, the bunker never broke her will. Time and time again, the chicken went to the coal bunker and time and time again, she returned to the hut ready to try another plan. The chicken was going to get them all out, even if she had to go to the cold bunker a million times. Now with the chicken back home, the plotting could begin again. Elaborate escape plans were immediately spread out on a makeshift table in Hut 17 which was escape central, the nerve center of the chicken farm. The right hand hen was the engineer of the group. It was the Scottish who could be relied on to come up with the technical know-how to execute all their escape plans. If valiant, the chicken was the heart of the outfit, her right hand hen was the brains.

Then there was a big hardy plain spoken hen, beside her, the sweet but dotty hen, always knitting placidly away, and finally her little sister, the quiet and shy little one of the family, the hen's little sister. These chickens formed the core of the chicken's henhouse family and they were all willing to throw themselves into the endless escape schemes no matter how powerless they turned out to be. And so, the next time Mr. Tweedy wheeled the egg cart out through the open gate, something unusual was taking place behind him in the chicken yard. Unseen by him, a small chicken feeding trough rose up on a pair of chicken feet and dashed for the gate. It wedged itself into the gate to keep it from closing. A moment later, behind it, a much larger feeding trough rose up this one on several pairs of chicken feet. The big feeder lurched across the yard, hit the gate sideways and panicked.

Finally, it tipped over. Mr. Tweedy looked back to find out what the ruckus was and saw many pairs of upside down chicken feet trying to run in midair. Back to the cold bunker for the chickens.

For more days and nights of waiting and plotting in the dark, and then out again and onto the next secret escape plan: A tunnel dug into the floor of the hen house. The tunnel which had been painstakingly dug with homes inch by inch while Mr. Tweedy was occupied elsewhere. All the chickens had taken turns digging. One chicken naturally was the first to try it out. She was lowered into the tunnel when she lay down on a waiting roller skate then through the tunnel and up to the surface, where she madly cranked an egg beater to break through the surface. The chicken was free. She popped up through the hole, looked around and climbed out and bumped right into a snarling, slobbering, growling dog. There'd been a slight miscalculation about where to come up on the far end. Back to the cold bunker.

Back to marking off the days on the wall and back out again. This time, an odd-looking version of Mrs Tweedy with long awkward stick legs and arms was seen laundering through the gate and past the dogs. This rather confused the dogs. It looked like a mistress, but was it their mistress? They didn't smell like their mistress.

Suddenly, the hem of the dress caught in a wheelbarrow and the dress slid off the strange form revealing chickens. Quite a few chickens were standing on each other's shoulders, busily operating the sticks and levers that moved the dummy Mrs Tweedy. The dogs were no longer confused. They charged and the chickens scurried back into the yard, screaming and left one of them outside the fence. This time, the lid to the coal bunker slammed behind the chicken with a bang that seemed to reverberate forever.