The dust cloud was moving closer. Jerry was still yelling. I grabbed Montana and three or four other chickens by their legs, flipping them upside down. This is supposed to calm the birds, or at least trick them into holding still. My hens are a bunch of ingrates, so they flapped around, screeching, trying to get a piece of my hand, or a fingernail, with their beaks. Jerry caught the other hens and we got them into the barn coop. I ran for my .22 while Jerry chased after Hitchcock. A .22 is not much of a gun. It's embarrassing to bring a .22 to a standoff with the government, but I had to live with the insult to my vanity. I climbed into the coop with the hens and looked out the peephole.

“Goddammit, bird,” Jerry said. He was half bent over, real ape-like, trying to grab Hitchcock. “This is for your own damn good. This is for the good of humanity.”

My dad would have known better than me and Jerry what to do. He was trained so well for combat he started to live for it, to seek it everywhere, create it when he couldn't find it. I was real mad at him when I was a girl, for re-enlisting all the time, for leaving me and Mom to grow the crops, manage the harvest, keep the woodpile stocked all winter. Now that I've had some time to think it through, I know he probably did it for our own good, because he knew deep down we weren't the enemy even though he treated us like we were most times. Still, I was real hateful to him the last time I saw him, just after my eighteenth birthday, when he flew home for Mom's funeral. He told me he had to go back, that he'd used up all his leave. I told him if I wanted to see him I'd just join the fucking jihad. I got the visit a few months later, the folded flag. It's up in barn storage, covered in a bunch of no-crow collars.

Jerry worked up a sweat chasing Hitchcock around. His forehead dripped and glistened, and the moisture set random chunks of his eyebrows against the grain. Hitchcock and Jerry were in a standoff, Hitchcock in full choked little crow, when Smith came through the barn door. I had a good view and a clear shot into that scene. I chewed some jerky and settled in for whatever was going to happen next.