“—she’s going to let me know when she starts selling some of the ducklings—”
“—sounds as if you need to worm them—”
“—yes, but the eggs are supposed to be that color in a Cayuga—”
I had to admit that the variety of ducks in the barn was an eye opener to someone who’d grown up knowing only fuzzy yellow ducklings and fluffy white ducks. There were plenty of ordinary white domestic ducks, but also beige ducks, brown ducks, black ducks, iridescent beetle-green ducks, blue-and-white ducks, and ducks whose color I would have described as “brown tweed,” although I doubted that was the official term.
I paused to admire a display of ducklings that was a popular attraction for the children attending the fair. The ducklings seemed to be having a great time, swimming around in a little pool, climbing out, waddling up a long, shallow ramp, and then sliding down a slide to land in the pool again with a plop.
“I should bring my kids to watch this,” I said to a woman leading a little girl not much older than Josh and Jamie.
“Only if you want to have them nag you for the next year about getting their own ducklings,” she said.
“We could keep them in our tub,” the little girl said. “They’d like it in our tub.”
The woman rolled her eyes. She had a point. Did I really want to take care of ducks on top of five llamas, two toddlers, two dogs, and a husband?
But they were cute. Maybe I could talk Dad into getting some ducks.
The goose and turkey barn was also—well, not exactly calm. If you stood in the middle of the tent, you could hear a deafening chorus of honking from one end and frenzied gobbling from the other. But the human inhabitants were busy and cheerful, if a little too ready to brag about their charges.
I heard several goose owners asserting that their birds weren’t ill-tempered and noisy and didn’t produce copious amounts of manure, while nearby other goose fanciers were touting their geese as expert sentinels and extolling the lush state their lawns could achieve when fertilized by geese.
The heritage breed turkey fanciers all seemed inordinately proud of the fact that their birds were all capable of breeding without artificial insemination. Or maybe they were just relieved.
“You mean every single turkey we see in the grocery store is a test-tube turkey?” one visitor was asking. “There must be millions of them!”
“Over two hundred and fifty million last year alone,” the heirloom turkey breeder replied. “And every single one of them a turkey-baster turkey, so to speak.”
“That seems like a lot of work for something so … so…”
“So easy for my birds to do without any help whatsoever from me,” the farmer said.
The women held out her hand for a flyer on how to order an heirloom turkey for Thanksgiving.
I didn’t need a flyer. I had all the turkey breeders’ names and addresses in my Un-fair files.
“But how do they do it?” the woman asked.
I decided this wasn’t something I wanted to hear about, so I moved on to the chicken tent.
As soon as I stepped inside, I realized that the chicken tent was still seething with tension and anxiety. Maybe it was understandable, since they were the ones who’d actually been hit by the thieves. But I was hoping that seeing the police hard at work on the investigation, together with the news of our patrols, would help.
Alas, no. As I looked around, I could see people walking around with their shoulders hunched tensely. People starting when someone came up behind them. People frowning or snapping at each other. Even the chickens were not cackling and clucking and crowing with the same carefree abandon they’d displayed yesterday, during the setting up, before the cruel abduction of two of their number.
I looked around to find the volunteer in charge of the tent. The new volunteer, now that Mr. Dauber had been exiled to the far end of the parking lot.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“You have no idea,” she said.
“Actually, looking around, maybe I do,” I said. “Seems even gloomier than it was this morning. I’d have thought everyone would have calmed down by now.”
“I think they would have if not for the Bellinghams,” she said.
“The Bellinghams?” Probably yet another heritage breed whose owners would be mortally insulted if I didn’t pretend I’d heard of it. I was fishing in my pocket for the list of breeds I’d printed from the American Livestock Breed Conservancy’s Web site. “What’s wrong with—oh! You mean the people whose Russian Orloff bantams were stolen? They’re the Bonnevilles.”
“Whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “If they’d just go home already, I think the mood would pick up.”