“To ward off other roosters, let them know, ‘This is my yard, I was here first.’ I love it, don’t you?”

“Love what?”

“The sound of it, the crow.”

“Oh. Yes. Very … rural.”

“I’m not sure I’d want a lot of roosters. But one is really nice.”

“Right.”

“Horace. At first I wasn’t sure, but now it seems the perfect name for him, doesn’t it?”

“I guess.” The truth was that the name Horace, for no reason that made sense, reminded him of the name Carl. And the name Carl, the instant it came to mind, came complete with the stricken eyes in the photograph, eyes that appeared to be staring at a demon.

“What about the other three? Huffy, Puffy, and Fluffy—do you think those names are too silly?”

It took Gurney a few seconds to refocus his attention. “Too silly for chickens?”

She laughed and shrugged. “As soon as we build their little house, with a nice open-air pen at one end, they can all move up from the stuffy barn.”

“Right.” His lack of enthusiasm was palpable.

“And you’ll make the pen predator-proof?”

“Yes.”

“The director of the clinic lost one of his Rhode Island reds last week. The little thing was there one minute, gone the next.”

“That’s the risk of letting them out.”

“Not if we build the right kind of pen. Then they can be out, running around, pecking in the grass, which they love, and still be safe. And it’ll be fun watching them—right over there.” She pointed again with an emphatic little jab of her forefinger at the area she’d chosen.

“So what does he think happened to his missing chicken?”

“Something grabbed it and carried it off. Most likely a coyote or an eagle. He’s pretty sure an eagle, because when we have the kind of drought we’ve had this summer they start looking for things other than fish.”

“Hmm.”

“He said if we’re going to build a pen we should be sure the wire mesh goes over the top and down at least six inches into the ground. Otherwise things can burrow underneath it.”

“Things?”

“He mentioned weasels. Apparently they’re really awful.”

“Awful?”

Madeleine made a face. “He said if a weasel gets in with the chickens, he’ll … bite their heads off—all of them.”

“Not eat them? Just kill them?”

She nodded, her lips pressed tightly together. More than a wince, it was an expression of empathic misery. “He explained that some kind of frenzy comes over a weasel … once he tastes blood. Once he does, he won’t stop biting until all the chickens are dead.”

Chapter 6

Ants