He rushed down to the edge of the pond to welcome his first billed guests. But they quickly duck-paddled away from him, over to the other side of the pond. “Skittish, huh?” Hal said. “Well, I’ll soon fix that.”

He ran back to his small barn to get the fifty-pound sack of birdseed he’d purchased in town the previous day. But when he threw the barn door open and looked in the corner where he’d dumped the bag of mixed seeds, he found it gone.

Hal searched the entire barn, his chicken coop and the area around both. There was no sack of birdseed. “Am I cuckoo,” he mused, scratching his beak, “or did someone steal my seed?”