The Kitchen Readings by Michael Cleverly

So, today, their awkward gait was caused by the boxing gloves that he had duct-taped onto their front paws. This was a serious impediment to their digging, and didn’t make loping any walk in the park either.
    As expected, when these two went to their reward, and passed into legend, they weren’t replaced. But the potential for a security breach was unacceptable. It was the beginning of the era of the peacocks.
    Peacocks are excellent watchdogs. They squawk and screech at the least little thing—without the digging. Perfect for Owl Farm. Collectively speaking, they’re called peafowl; the females are peahens, and the males are peacocks. We always referred to them as “the peacocks,” though. Gender be damned. No one at Owl Farm was particularly concerned about offending the 4H Club.
    The inventory of birds at Owl Farm would always vary, depending on a number of factors. Attrition due to predator interest was one significant factor. The peacocks were a link in the food chain, waiting to be consumed. The predator population of Woody Creek is diverse. Of course there were countless coyotes; they were ubiquitous. Then there were the foxes; they were always the prime suspects when a peacock went missing. This because when a bird was done in, the culprit would usually return on subsequent nights looking for more of the same. Hunter would trap the peacock killer, and nine tenths of the time it was a fox. Hunter would use something called a “live trap.” This was exactly what the name implies. A live trap neither kills nor injures an animal. The trapper has the option of carting the critter away and setting it loose, or, if he’s less a gambler and wants to rid himself of the creature forever, he has a target that’s hard to miss. There were days when I arrived at Owl Farm to find a fox in one of the live traps, docile, awaiting its fate. Hunter’s assistant, Deborah Fuller, who lived in the other cabin on the property, once told me that the foxes responded the same way to her, docile, resigned—but when Hunter would arrive to inspect the catch, they’d go nuts, snarling and frothing and pacing. How did they know? Hunter would give them a little lecture before he shot them; he thought he owed them that much, an explanation. It didn’t seem to help. When I’d occasionally come upon one post mortem, its body would be frozen in such an attitude of crazed fury, with such an expression of viciousness and rage on its face, that there was no question about the creature having “gone gently into that good night.”
    Another factor that contributed to the peacock inventory at Owl Farm was, quite naturally, the birth rate. This would depend upon the number of mature females in residence anygiven spring, and on how many eggs each of the girls felt like laying. Of course there was more to the egg issue than just the laying. There were two perfectly good peacock pens, one attached to each of the cabins on the property. Sometimes the birds would see the logic in laying their eggs in the relative safety of the pens, sometimes not. When one of the ladies would choose to lay someplace totally unacceptable, like the backseat of the car someone was about to drive off in, the eggs had to be moved. This happened more often than you’d expect. When it did happen, it fell to Hunter to transport the eggs.
    Peacocks are pretty friendly birds. They recognize you and actually seem capable of forming a bond with people they’re used to. Hunter was truly fond of them, and it seemed that the affection was reciprocated to some degree. The peahens’ warm feelings for Hunter, however, did not suffice for them to tolerate egg snatching.
    One warm spring afternoon I pulled into Owl Farm to find Hunter lurking. To find a man who’s master of his domain lurking in his own yard gave me a moment’s pause. Hunter explained that one of the birds had laid two eggs on the tractor. Since the