Cockfighter - Charles Ray Willeford [76]
“All right. If you say so, Frank. But he doesn't feel fat to me!”
Although Omar had been fighting cocks for four years, it was evident that he had never “felt” a truly conditioned game-cock. The right feel of a gamecock is indescribable. Maybe it is an instinct of some kind, but if a man ever gets the right feel of a perfectly conditioned gamecock in his fingers, his fingers never forget. The exact right feel is an incorporeal knowledge, and once the fingers memorize it, they are never satisfied until they find it again. When a gamecock has the right feel, it is ready for the pit. Omar thought my regular diet was drastic, but I had to get the excess fat off his birds before I could put them on my special conditioning diet.
I checked the list again: 1 tablespoon of 2/3 cracked corn and 1/3 whole oats, once a day, tossed into scratch pen. One-fourth of an apple every four days. Two ounces of hamburger every ten days. Plenty of grit and oyster shells available at all times. Keep the water cups full.
This was a good diet, a practical feed I had learned through long apprenticeship. The chickens wouldn't starve, and they wouldn't get fat. If they had any fat when they were put on it, they would lose it in a hurry. And as long as this diet was maintained, any cock could be switched to a battle-conditioning diet and be ready to fight within ten days. By weighing them daily, any sudden, dangerous weight loss would be detected, and the feed could be increased slightly. But Omar had to begin somewhere, and the new diet was the first step forward in his professional education. I returned the list to my unhappy partner, and this time he accepted it. The Claret crowed deeply, anxious to get some more attention.
“You'd better crow now,” Omar shouted at the gamecock. “By this time next week you'll be too damned hungry to crow!”
The conditioning of game fowl is not a job for a lazy man. To condition five gamecocks for the hack coming up was easy for me, but I don't think Omar had ever worked as hard in his life. The way he groaned and complained was downright funny. Just wait, I thought, until we start conditioning twenty or thirty at a time. In order to get six cocks ready for the Tifton derby, we would have to condition at least twenty.
After I rousted Omar out of bed at his farm at four thirty two mornings in a row, he brought a cot and his sheets over to my shack and bunked there. There was an old Negro couple, Leroy and Mary Bondwell, who looked after Omar at his farmhouse. During the two weeks Omar lived with me, Leroy fed Omar's cocks with the new diet. Every afternoon Omar drove home to check and weigh his birds, returning to my place for the evening conditioning sessions.
Buford dropped by for an hour or so every day, and I would put him to work changing straw in the coops, painting coop walks with creosote, or give him some other kind of odd job. But Omar and I, on a strict time schedule, did everything else.
I wakened Omar daily at five. I shaved and Omar fixed breakfast. By five thirty, at the latest, we were in the cockhouse.
During the entire conditioning period, the cocks were each kept in a separate stall in the cockhouse. The wooden slats on each door were close enough together so the chicken couldn't stick his neck between them and jump up and down. They were so hungry, they thought they were going to be fed every time a man entered the cockhouse. If they were allowed to bounce up and down, with their necks between the slats, they would bruise the top of their dubbed heads.
While Omar crushed two hard-boiled eggs, shells and all, into the feed pan, I measured out cracked Flint corn and pinhead oats. When the mixture was blended, each of the five cocks got one heaping teaspoonful. We never mixed more than enough for one feeding, and they all got a second feeding that night. Every other morning I tossed three or four large chunks of marble grit on the floor of their stalls.