The chickens guessed Hamlet immediately, much to his disappointment. Naturally they couldn't shout out the answer so he had to give them some options and ask them to cackle assent or dissent. They got the Iliad in no time because he'd read it to them two summers previously. He had them stumped with a few biblical stories but the Rooster seemed to know about the raising of Lazarus and a few hens looked at him with new respect, although he sauntered out of the coup as if to say that the whole thing was altogether too effete for him to waste his time on, when there was grain to be pecked outside. And again, dozens of fresh eggs rewarded their master's efforts.

However, even in the dim crevices of Mr P 's mind there was the realisation that something here was not exactly as it should be. Animals had been known to show signs of intelligence before, especially pigs. Some animals responded to music. But chickens were generally held to be not to be much more sentient alive than they were on a spit and he knew he had something unique. Only one person could advise him: the deranged widow who lived alone down by the river at the bottom of the canyon.

He told his wordless wife that he was going fishing, and it she seemed to nod. She was becoming less and less mobile and he occasionally held a mirror to her mouth to see if she'd gone yet. The path down to the river was all loose scree and boulders and he nearly fell a few times, but after a couple of hours he saw the widow-in-black from afar. She was flailing a fox against the side of her house, a not uncommon pursuit for a woman who'd been known to wear hats made of cow dung.

"So your chickens reads plays and play charades?" she rhetoricized. "It's been known to happen." Her eyes seem to revolve in their sockets and he didn't know where to look. She had one tooth and spat at him when she spoke. He looked around the fetid cottage, hopeful of seeing one of the mythical dung hats.

"They don't read plays.. I read plays; they just listen. But they request what they want on bits of paper in hollow eggs that one of them lays." Even as he said it, he feared for his tenuous sanity. It was not far from playing charades with chickens to beating dead foxes against your house.

"It wasn't dead when I started," she said, reading his thoughts. "Look, there's only one thing you can do. Kill the one who lays the hollow legs. She's in nuisance and she'll have you playing music or installing sculpture in the coup next. They have to learn who's boss." He was about to question her further but her tongue started to loll from her mouth and she launched herself through the open window, surprisingly agile for her age.

And so it was that Mr Papadopoulos and his dumb wife enjoyed chicken soup that evening, sucking the bones with evident pleasure. After dinner, he went out to the coup with a copy of his usual reading matter. But it was empty. Not a chicken to be seen. There was an egg  placed conspicuously in the centre of the area where they normally sat for the reading and he picked it up with dread. It was hollow.

He unfolded the paper with trembling hands. Inside was a receipt from Athens mail-order company for an inflatable raft. He dropped the fractured shell, grabbed a torch and headed for the river.

He could hear the cackles from far away. The night was pitch black and he stumbled precariously down the rock-strewn path with his shot gun under his arm. After all he'd done for them! How many other chickens could boast of having been read to? He felt humiliation suffusing his face. He'd performed charades for these ungrateful cluckers! They were a little down river from the widow's house, which was clearly visible due to the flaming totem pole she'd erected  there to ward off owl spirits, so she'd said.

" Stop!" he yelled, and fired off a blast at the raft, which immediately deflated. The clamour of cackling arose and they berated his legs with beaks and wings so that he had to fire once again in the air to disperse them. "What's going on? I treated you well. I have to eat some of you because that's why I keep you. You know that!" they grumbled, reluctantly acknowledging the fact of a certain inevitable attrition in numbers.