One minor incident occurred, of relevance to this story. The old dairy pasture beyond our lawn was getting overgrown and in danger of reverting to forest. I rented a brush-hog from the hardware store and spent a day of pleasantly mindless labor dragging the squat, all-devouring machine back and forth by tractor across the scrub of brambles and baby pines, leaving satisfying stripes of stubble in my wake. Halfway through the job I saw a turkey hen sitting in some tall weeds. She looked up as I cruised by but she didn’t move, and I realized she must have made her nest there. I steered around her, leaving a small island of brush to keep her hidden. Caitlin was alarmed when I explained the situation. She had a gift for immersing herself in the lives of whatever creatures, human or otherwise, lay closest to hand, and these ungainly birds had joined the ranks of this fondly tended menagerie. She got it into her head that, having drawn the creature here in the first place with our birdseed, we were now responsible for the successful hatching of her eggs. To that end, and with encouragement from an article in one of the many wildlife publications she read, she decided she needed to camp out in the meadow at night for the four-week incubation period, to keep the foxes away.

I don’t sleep well alone. I did try sleeping in the tent with her, but after a couple of uncomfortable nights I resigned myself to a period of solitary slumber, doing my best not to complain. Anyway it rained fairly often and on those nights, if the rain was hard enough, Caitlin felt it was safe to stay inside. By some miraculous dispensation of the powers that preside over marital harmony, we entered a phase of frequent lovemaking. Our wedding anniversary fell during this time, and we went out to celebrate at our favorite restaurant. It happened to be a dry evening, unseasonably warm, and we had a candlelit dinner on the restaurant’s creek-side terrace. I wasn’t thinking about the turkey as we drove home, and Caitlin said nothing about her. We went to bed, made love and fell asleep in each other’s arms. Early the next morning I heard a cry from the meadow, and ran outside. Caitlin had gone to check on the nest and was standing in front of it, in a state of extreme anguish. The hen was gone, and all her eggs had been broken. It wasn’t Caitlin’s style to blame other people for things that went wrong, and she didn’t say anything directly reproachful to me, but as we stood there looking at the wreckage of the nest with its glistening smashed eggshells spotted with blood, I heard her muttering furiously to herself: “I should’ve just done what I wanted to do! I shouldn’t have given in! I always give in!”