Poor Chicken!

We suffered our first casuality yesterday. Raphael was killed by a black snake yesterday. I let the chickens out all day to roam. Daniel got home around 5:15pm and all were accounted for. I got home around 6:15 and went to check on them. I was walking back to the coop and all was unsually quiet. As soon as I started past our shed I saw a hawk fly off. I get back to the coop and only 2 birds were standing there--they were very still. And then I saw my little 3 month old chicken with something black wrapped around it. I ran up to the house to get Daniel and told him to bring the shovel. That black snake didn't stand a chance. Too bad for the chicken and black snake. (For those of you who think killing a black snake that killed my chicken is wrong--sorry. We had to protect the rest of our flock.) We began looking around and none of the other 4 little chickens were around. Daniel picked up the two chickens that were just standing there and put them in the coop. The only thing we could think of was that the hawk got the other 4. We went inside and finished eating dinner (yum!) and I came back outside to stay with the bigger chickens to make sure they made it back to the coop safely. As I'm cleaning out the coop, here comes a little chicken flying through the yard until it made it back into the coop. The another. And then the last two little chickens. They hid in the underbrush of our yard for 3 hours and didn't make a peep. Daniel and I looked and looked and couldn't find them--they hid well. So we only lost one little chicken. Thank goodness. Although, the poor little chickens were so scared today that none of them came down from their perch. Poor little chickens.