Two modern-day Robin Hoods live on opposite banks of Spring Creek. One lives on the Sherwood side, the other shares a house with her husband on a farm across the river between Mertzon and San Angelo. The latter is Mrs. Robin Hood, a semi-retired interior decorator. I may have written about her as she used to come in off all-night volunteer emergency duty from attending the needy to hang a bill on me for drapes and carpeting that'd make His Highness, the King of Saudi Arabia, want to bury his head in a sand dune.

The Mr. Robin Hood is a retired electrician who has the strange policy of refusing to rewire or repair anyone's system who can afford to pay him. He keeps the pensioned widows and graybeards' appliances in service. His sideline is doing missionary work in the area's jails. He is held in high esteem county-wide, as is Mrs. Robin Hood. But for my money, they are both a couple of softies out of place in this highly sophisticated age where life's score is tallied on the stock market reports.

The other morning at the post office, a new slant developed on the legend of the electrician Robin Hood. He wanted to know if I knew anyone who wanted a rooster. "In the spring," he explained, "raccoons devoured all a widow lady's chickens over at Sherwood except four old hens. By the time I heard about the raid on her chicken house, the feed store in Angelo only had seven baby chicks left, and one of them was dying."

We paused and greeted the citizens coming for their mail. Once the interruptions ended, he continued, "Wife and I kept the chicks in the house. Like to run us crazy peeping all the time. But when they were big enough to sex, five of them turned out to be roosters, leaving only one pullet." So, he says, "I placed the first two on a hobby farm that had two hens, my sidekick Cresencio put his in his freezer, and a trusty over at the jail in Angelo slipped one in the jailyard as a mate for an old hen."

Sounded like his Christian charity had turned into a scheme to be rid of a bunch of noisy roosters. Certainly no sign of good faith to overstock a hobby farmer with two roosters to go with two hens, and certainly a betrayal of trust slipping a rooster in the jailyard to crow his lungs out on a Sunday morning and to awaken Saturday night prisoners incarcerated to sleep off the immoderate use of liquid refreshments.

Also made me nervous to even think about Cresencio butchering a fryer for his freezer. A fortnight before the national press reported that an animal rights group had stopped the Maryland National Guard from training recruits to dress a chicken on the battlefield, opening a complicated case. First of all, The Geneva Accord, to my knowledge, does not cover soldiers living off the countryside. Second, chickens are cannibals. Tilt their rations in the slightest and the large will eat the small. In all, so such high-minded dedication to the rights of animals over the survival of starved infantryman, the question must be further addressed how to rank the rights of animals willing to eat each other.

Furthermore, Cresencio Rodriguez is the pastor of a church too small to keep him in fried chicken. The pen mates of the frozen fryer are living in splendor on a play farm and right out the door of a jailer's kitchen overflowing with tasty scraps. The Robin Hood guy may have oversold his clients on roosters, but until he places the last one, he is not going to let the rooster starve, like the mystic order of animal rights is willing to plot for the soldiers in the Maryland National Guard.

But back to the post office. I told him he might check down the street from my town house for a rooster placement. The fellow living in the pink house on the right-hand side of the street keeps a menagerie of staked billy goats and free-ranging chickens. However, to be sure not to ask the neighbors for directions. Last week the goat herder drew 44 buzzards into town to join him in the final stages of an outdoor goat-butchering ending in the trash barrel. (I'm choosing delicacy here over blurting out the truth.) "Things are mighty emotional in that part of town," was how I left it with "Robin Hood."

Sure as you sign up to be an ambulance driver or a volunteer fireman, the siren will blow right in the middle of the news or a football game. Not many communities can boast of two Robin Hoods. I haven't heard if the animal rights folks have caught Cresencio. But if they do hit town, the goat herders had better lie low ...

October 19, 2000