A hawk flies into my yard. Spotted brown and white, a Cooper’s hawk, he swoops on my flock, scattering them from their foraging spot. They escape under the wisteria and wail, shrill and desperate sounds. The hawk gathers himself in the sky to try again, coasting on an afternoon draft, and when he descends, talons spread, I catch him in one hand. His heart beats against my palm. We’re all afraid and we don’t know what happens next.
“Haven’t you ever been hungry?” he asks.
I tell him I’ve never been so hungry that I would eat something precious. His eyes are dark orange and can see for miles farther than mine. One million years ago, his forebirds converged here. Crossed the Bering bridge and molted and regrew and tore open small scurrying things and saw blue become green become brown become grey, and they never wanted anything they didn’t need.
This hawk is so small, barely bigger than a chicken. It would be easy to kill him and keep the flock safe, or make myself feel like they’re safe. Take revenge on nature. Instead, I raise the hawk above my head and open my hands. As he slips out, his leg spurs slice jagged gashes across my ring and middle fingers. He flaps hard until he reaches a thermal and glides west.
Once the shadow of the hawk has gone, I lift one of the wisteria’s tentacles and speak softly to my birds. He’s gone, I tell them. You’re safe. You can come out now. They tuck their wings and run to the safety of the coop, all but my smallest, slowest bird, who is tangled in a root. I crawl under and unspool her foot, pick her up, hold her against my chest, careful not to get blood on her white feathers. She alarms into my shirt as I carry her to the others. You’re okay, I tell her, but she’s inconsolable and small and old, and I know that one morning soon, she won’t raise her head with the sun.
A raccoon skitters into my yard. Hours into the night, under an almost-no moon, it reaches one arm through the wire mesh, feeling around for sleeping birds. A handful of bedding, a handful of corn pellets, a handful of grit. All tasted and spit back out, and I creep across the yard with my aluminum bat. Neither of us is fast enough, so we end up in a standoff in the back corner of the run. The raccoon backs against the concrete bricks. There is a bald patch on its haunch, smooth grey, maybe the result of a dumpster skirmish or another failed foraging expedition like this one.
We can both leave, I tell the thief. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will.
“Don’t you still want everything you’ve ever wanted,” it asks me, feeling around in the dark behind it for a purchase to climb away, “as if it was the first moment you wanted it?”
No, I lie, and I swing the bat as hard as I can at the spot beside its head. The impact reverberates through my elbows and shoulders, clangs so loud that the lack of an echo feels wrong. Hot mercury pain in my joints.
The raccoon hops a few times before it finds a handhold, scrambles up the brick, and leaps south to a nearby tree branch. The bare smoke-colored flesh of its bald patch shudders. Before it climbs down the tree, it turns back, sharp teeth bared.
“You are an evil thing,” it hisses, and then it’s gone.
Tucking the bat under my armpit, I squat next to the coop and check the wire mesh for breaches with numb hands. The birds are asleep, necks folded into soft teacup-handle shapes, except for the fat grey hen. She watches me with one half-open eye, drooping back to sleep already. I’m sorry if I scared you, I whisper, and she trills once, low burbling, and then we are all quiet.
A coyote leaps into my yard. The wall is seven feet tall, and she clears it with ease, lands quietly in the sand. The mountains are pink. The day is ending. All six birds scurry in nonsense patterns, wailing, too panicked to find cover. I hear them from the shower, so I run out in a towel and wave my arms at the coyote, shooing her back to the golf course or desert or empty subdivision. This should work, but she doesn’t budge. She sits down and lifts her snout.
“I won’t leave without one,” she says.
Aren’t there enough stray cats around for you, I ask.
Her tail flicks from one side to the other, curling over her back paw. She’s walnut brown and horribly thin. The chickens are still running, bumbling into one another, jumping and flapping. In their fear, they have forgotten how to get around the fence to their coop. We both watch them for a while, our desperations a mirage in the air between us.
“My pups are starving,” she says, over the squawking. “I carried them, felt them multiply inside me with every distant song. I would feed them my own body if I could. I would feed them you. I would feed them the sun. Do you think your love is greater than mine?”
It doesn’t have to be, I say, and I lunge, letting the towel fall. She dodges easily, long legs springing her toward the run. I fall on the gravel, cutting open both knees and scratching my stomach, and crawl after her. She’s shoving her head through the gate, snuffling in the dirt, mindless with how close she is now, and I grab her tail, tug, climb on top of her, grab her scruff, and scream. I scream every sleepless night and unrequited love and unkind mirror into her open jackal mouth. My wet hair clings to both our faces. Finally, she stops struggling and stares at me through one sharp eye. The saddest anger I’ve ever seen. I know that when I let go, she will leave. I think about tightening my grip, how much force it might take to grind her into the rocks beneath us. Before I can let go, she twists out from under me, sprints to the north wall, and leaps over, away.
The birds scramble from me when I open the bent gate to corral them. Blood trickles down my calf and beads on the sand. The buff hen collides with my leg and screams as if I’ve kicked her. I’m angry at them for being afraid of me, even though I know it’s not rational. You’re fine, I say, trying to keep my voice soft. I’m not, I start, but I don’t finish, because I am.
A bear lumbers into my yard. I am so tired, watching from the window as he bends the back gate off the hinges with one heavy paw. A black bear. He crushes the morning glories, pastel purples stark-open for the rising sun, and spills the rain barrel. I will the chickens to stay quiet so that he might not notice them, might ravage a few more fixable things before leaving. Of course, they alarm when they see him, and his massive head snaps up. I see him see them. Pupils narrow. Mouth drops open. Honest, awful hunger.
I consider letting him have what he wants. Relief on the other side of the inevitable, worst fear finally fulfilled. Then I pull on my boots and run past him to block the door to the coop. The birds go quiet.
“Awareness of yourself won’t keep you safe,” he tells me. “You can’t see the back of your own delicious head.”
I grip the mesh on each side of the door and say nothing. Had I known this would happen, I might have made their coop out of something impenetrable. The bear moves closer. His fur is the color of not knowing where you are. His eyes look like mine. His breath warms my face. If he wanted and I let him, he could pull all of my insides out. I wish, in my smallest compartment, that he would.
“Do you imagine it would feel peaceful?” He heaves himself up to stand on two legs. “Can you conceive of nothing? Would that be enough for you, finally?”
I want to close my eyes, but I don’t. It doesn’t matter, I say. It will all happen as it happens.
The bear drops back down to all fours, unsettling desert dust around us. He’s perfect black, like he’s never been touched. It hurts to see the disappointment in his eyes. My fingers, when I let loose of the coop wire, are ridged with tiny red squares. They ache when I unbend them, but I spread my fingers out and raise my arms above my head. I can’t get any sound to come, but I make myself big.
The bear shakes his head back and forth, ears flopping, and turns away. He takes his time. To the east, to the mountains. Once he’s gone, I sink to the ground and lean my back against the coop door.
He’s gone, I tell the birds. They reach their faces through the mesh to peck at my shirt. I show them my hands so they can see I have nothing, but they investigate the new gouges with their sharp little beaks. It stings, and I let them.
A plague blows into my yard. We have heard it coming, how it fills the lung and empties the mind in mere hours. Whole flocks gone without warning. I wash my hands every time I go out and come back, and still, one morning, I find my tallest white bird facedown on the coop floor. To be sure, I lay a hand on her wing, hoping she will flinch away as she usually does when I try to pet her. But she’s stiff. I lift her body, cradle her small head in the crook of my elbow, slot my pointer finger in her curled talon, one last chance to grip.
The other birds are quiet. I hold her out to them so they can say goodbye, understand her absence for later. They stretch their necks to scan her. Quiet coos. I don’t know if they get it. I don’t know if I get it.
Away from the flock, I inspect her. Her closed eyes, her mussed plumage, her beak with the chip at the end from pecking bugs off the concrete wall. There are no signs of damage, which is a sign of plague. The plague rises off of her like sick steam, going everywhere.
How could you, I ask the plague, but a plague is too small to speak, if it cared to speak at all. Still, I hold out my sliced hands and knees, my scraped gut, my invisible aching bones. Don’t these count for anything?