A hen who leaves the farm

The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, the notes begin, tells of death in a calm voice, and takes a position of the writer’s own — though they do not name the author in this stretch. The heroine, Leafie, leaves the chicken farm and, in the course of meeting many threats, comes at last to understand something of the order of life.

The weasel that keeps threatening her can, like her, become another predator’s prey. It is also a mother, trying to protect its young, and no different from Leafie in that. She feels pity, and at the same time a sense that they are kin.

Death as the keeping of an order

The book, they write, sees death as a means of keeping the order of an ecosystem. It treats the death of animals, and then widens that treatment to the death of living things as a natural current in the ecosystem. The student writing these notes respects Leafie for coming to know the principle of that cycle, and for coming, through it, even to understand the weasel.

A wish that she had struggled longer

And yet they felt a regret. Leafie does not go against the cycle of the ecosystem; she accepts it as it is. They also regretted that she accepted death so readily for Greenhead, the son she had borne in her heart. They wished she had struggled a little harder to live. Had they been Leafie, they write, they would have trusted Greenhead more. He had already joined the flock of mallards, so the chance of winning a fight was greater together than if she faced the weasel alone.

The notes leave the book at that wish, before a later block that only lays out the assignment’s headings. The same Korean report, written out more fully, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly: Leafie, a weasel who is also a mother, and a wish that she had trusted Greenhead and lived a little longer. The author is not named in this stretch.

Last updated: 15 November 2026