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The drive back was endless. I felt like a dope for my impatience, aware that if current trends held, I was rushing us all back to a surly turkey hen sitting on a mound of dead eggs. Even so, as we approached our interstate exit and Steven suggested going on into town to run some errands, I snapped a panicky “No!” Looking straight ahead, I adjusted my tone. “Can we go straight back to the farm, please?”

Before we even pulled up to the house I was out of the truck, making a beeline for the poultry barn. When I stepped inside I thought I heard a new sound—a peeping sound. It was probably the sparrows that always hung around the barn looking for spilled grain. “Don’t be disappointed,” I counseled myself, and then repeated the warning aloud because Lily was right behind me. I opened the door to the turkey coop and we slipped inside, approaching the nest-corner slowly, letting our eyes adjust to the dimness inside the slatted turkey room. Number One Mom still sat on her nest. She looked different, though, with her wings held out oddly from her body. We stood still and watched.

There, under her wing, was it something? Lily squeezed my hand and uttered a high-pitched squeak like a baby mouse. It was something. A tiny dark eye, as small as a hatpin head, peeked out at us. A fluffy head emerged. Two heads!

One of them wiggled out from under Mama, and it was the real thing: a ball of fluff just like a marshmallow peep, honey blond with a dark spot on top of its head. We could see the white egg-tooth still on the end of its beak. This chick was still damp from the egg, its fluff a bit spiky and its walk adorably uncoordinated. Lily looked at me with huge eyes and whispered: “We have babies.”

“She has babies,” I said. This time they would be raised right, by a turkey mother, ending once and for all in our barnyard the indignity of unnatural intervention. But my heart was on Lily’s side: we had babies. This was about the youngest creature we had ever seen, tottering on wobbly legs, falling over its feet.

It was hard to resist the temptation to scoop it up in our hands, but we didn’t. We were dying to know how many more she had, how old, whether the hatch was finished. But when we approached she lowered her head and hissed at us, snakelike, rumpling her auburn feathers to make herself twice her normal size. Then she looked away. Number One Mother had bigger things on her mind now, and the instincts to do them perfectly.

She had been so faithful to her nest, she had to be hungry and thirsty. Bribery might be just the ticket. Lily ran outside to gather a handful of grass while I approached with a cup of water, holding it close enough for her to get a long drink. She accepted détente and settled down. When Lily came back with the grass, she gobbled it.

While she was distracted by the food, I reached underneath her breast feathers. I could feel a considerable number of eggs under there, smooth to my fingertips. Their heat was almost shocking. One of them felt less smooth. I touched its surface carefully and decided it was slightly cracked. As slowly as I could manage, I drew it out from under her and took a close look. Near the pointed end, a spiderweb of cracks had begun.

The egg began to tremble and thump in my palm, a sensation so animate and peculiar. I put it to my ear and heard a sturdy, high-pitched peeping. I held it to Lily’s ear, and watched her eyes grow wide. This egg was alive, though it looked for all the world like an ordinary breakfast food. The effect was wildly unsettling. My heart raced as I tucked the warm egg back under Mama.

We’d gone the whole circle, raising our mail-order hatchlings into the most senior demographic of American turkeys. Now, just after her first birthday, one of the nation’s eldest had begat its newest. Only a few times in my life have I actually seen lives begin, and never had I held in my palm that miracle caught in the act.

The chick that had come out now dived back into the feather security blanket, disappearing