Bone Harvest by Mary Logue Read Free Book Online Page B

up high in the sky, a scream.
    Her mother’s head lifted at the sound. She dropped the sheet she was stretching out on the line and came running.
     
    Rich had driven to the Daniels farm a few times before. They lived up the bluff from Fort St. Antoine, on the rolling farmland that surrounded the lake. As he approached the farm today, he felt the sky open above him. He sometimes drove up near their farm just to watch the weather. It was so much easier to see when a storm was coming out of the basin of the bluffs.
    Rich had bought eggs from the Danielses, but he didn’t know them very well. Having moved to the area about ten years ago, they were relative newcomers. Meg played with their children, so Claire knew them better.
    Rich had been surprised when Celia Daniels had phoned him this morning—surprised that she even knew who he was. As he drove up the bluff, he remembered her call.
    She had been terribly upset, her voice high and shrill. “Our chickens are dying. The vet is out on call. I didn’t know who else to try. Because of your pheasants, I thought you might know something.”
    He wasn’t sure he could do anything, but at a time like this it often helped to have someone else there. She had mentioned that her husband had gone to the Fleet Farm in Menomonie and wouldn’t be back until late afternoon. Rich had a sack of clothes sitting next to him on the seat. He would change his before he went back home. If the poultry at the Daniels farm were carrying anything, he didn’t want to bring it back home to his pheasant flock.
    Rich pulled into the long driveway that curved around the farmhouse and headed toward the barn. He stayed on it until he saw the family gathered at the other side of an outbuilding. He stopped the car and got out. A lanky boy of about ten ran out to greet him.
    “Four have died so far,” the boy announced.
    “Are you Thomas?” Rich asked, hoping he had remembered correctly.
    “Yeah.” The boy pointed at the little girl standing next to her mother. “That’s Jilly. She’s the one who found the chickens. They’re kinda hers. Dad bought them for her. She takes care of them.”
    On the drive up, Rich had been searching his mind for any disease that could come on this fast and be this fatal. The one that occurred to him was Newcastle disease. He knew that the Danielses were into back-to-the-land living, eschewing pesticides and chemical fertilizers; he wondered if they believed in inoculating their animals. If they didn’t, that might be the problem.
    As he walked up to Celia Daniels, he could see that she and her daughter had been crying. The little girl’s face was streaked with dirt and tears. She was holding an egg in each hand. Her head was leaning against her mother’s thigh.
    “I don’t know what to do about them,” Celia Daniels told him. “I don’t know what’s wrong. They’re dying.”
    Looking over the flock, Rich saw that they were all Barred Rock chickens, handsome chickens with brown and white stripes and small combs. His uncle used to have a flock of them.
    As he recalled, Barred Rocks did well in the cold weather of the upper Midwest. His uncle kept them because they were a good dual-purpose chicken for a small farm. They laid nice brown eggs and then when their productive time was over, they could be dressed into good broilers, too.
    Rich bent down and looked at the chicken that was flopped on the ground in front of him. No spittle at the beak, no nasal discharge. He touched the small bird, not so long dead that warmth didn’t hang in its feathers, and wondered what had happened in its body that it had failed.
    “How long has this been going on? Did you notice anything wrong with them last night?” he asked.
    Celia reached down and tipped up Jilly’s face. “How did the chickens seem last night?”
    “Normal.”
    “What does that mean?” Rich asked.
    The little girl looked up at him. “I found a bunch of eggs. They were going to sleep. None of them were