I knew it was bad when I saw how he was standing, just sort of straight as a board with his thumbs hooked in his utility belt and his Mountie hat placed low on his brow, like Marshal Dillon. It was, for all intents, the kind of pose a guy named Rocky might take if he was about to lay down the Law—if he was, not to put too fine a point on it, about to fire you. And yet it wasn’t until I had moved closer (he was standing in the middle of the walkway between pens) that I realized he wasn’t looking at me at all; rather, he was staring at one of the enclosures—an enclosure which had been ripped open as if a bomb had gone off. Ripped open, I realized—now that I was close enough to examine it—not from without, by vandals, say, but from within. Ripped open as if by the chickens themselves—whose nu
