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John pulls into the driveway at dusk, just in time to see a flash of animal eyes in his headlights that resolves into a fox loping off with one of his hens. He yanks on the parking brake and throws himself out of the truck while the engine's still running, taking off at a sprint before he can really think about it. He shouts, hoping to scare it into dropping the bird, but it's too late. His heart's pounding hard enough that his hand shakes a little when he reaches to turn off the ignition, and he gets the rest of the chickens into the coop for the night and then slams the back door with enough force to rattle the frame when he finally goes inside.
Hours later, he's still buzzing with leftover adrenaline, guilt or remorse tugging at the back of his mind and making him restless. He tries listening to the game on the radio but turns it off after a while, replacing the play-by-play and cheers of the crowd with different noises—low hum of the fridge, racket of crickets and katydids outside in the dark.
He sits at the kitchen table and drinks two beers, eats half a sandwich, works his way halfheartedly through part of the mail pile, folds an invoice into a paper football and flicks it between his beer-bottle goalposts (three points!), cracks open a third beer. He pulls out labels and a marker for the honey jars, but he doesn't really have the focus or the steady hand to make much progress with those, either, and he ends up doodling honeybees and tiny jets flying in perfect, synchronized formation instead.
Eventually, he gives up the sandwich as a lost cause, too, dumps the rest of it in the trash and slices himself another piece of bread, toasting it up and drizzling it with some of the early spring honey, and somehow that does the trick. Something about the way it smells and the sweet, bright shock of it on his tongue grounds and quiets him—he can taste apple blossoms from the orchard over the ridge, and he knows that in a few months, those trees will be heavy with macouns and macs and northern spies because of his bees. That's the cycle of this place—things grow, and they die, and maybe it's the beers catching up with him, or maybe he's just run out of energy to be pissed off, but it's starting to seem almost fair that, since she was smart enough or lucky enough to snag one of John's laying hens, the fox gets to eat well tonight.
It's late, and the breeze kicking up and coming through the window now smells damp, like pine and earth and rain—tomorrow he has a couple of deliveries first thing, and then he'll see about dealing with some of the logs out back, if it's not too wet. And Ronon's promised to bring some guy up over the weekend, so John thinks about that as he puts his plate and empty bottles in the sink; as he strips down and turns off the bedroom light, he thinks about a pile of sleepy fox kits with full bellies, and safe, roosting hens, and his bees snug in their hives for the night, and he curls his body into the cool, empty landscape of his bed and shuts his eyes.