of dirt with foot-high stone walls and smoothed them out, narrow paths in between. The small terraced beds descended to the cottage, complementing it in scale and form, their stacked-shale borders lending the place an old-fashioned feel. Wild white roses climbed among the trees, their blooms filling the clearing with strong, sweet scent. A few yards beyond the back window of the kitchen coursed a little brook, low and murmuring.
In the quiet—disturbed only by the occasional whine of a speedboat on Cayuga Lake a mile to our east—we tended the garden and watched the songbirds that came to our feeders: chickadees and cardinals, finches and rose-breasted grosbeaks, a bright indigo bunting, three scarlet tanagers startlingly brilliant against the emerald grass. A turkey hen and her brood frequently picked their way through the clearing, giving us the chance to see the young ones grow from small, puffy juveniles into longer, leaner birds almost indistinguishable from their mother. On the grass we often found their broad tail feathers, barred in black and brown. We dubbed our new home Bird Cottage.
The next year was even better. Planting was easy. No rototilling, rock hauling or wall building. We had the luxury of turning soil with shovels, adding some compost, and presto: seeds in the ground. By summer the beds were happily pushing up lettuce and broccoli, nasturtiums and tomatoes. We still got many of our vegetables from the grocery store, food co-op, and farmers’ market. But the garden gave us things we couldn’t buy. It connected us to land and food: handling the cool spring soil, marking rows with trowel or finger, seeing young plants burgeon, inhaling the sweet musk of tomato leaves, savoring fruit still warm from the sun. Five minutes from earth to table.
It was perfect. I had achieved my goal. I was a benign herbivore, as nature intended me to be. Leaving blood and carnage behind, I had found the moral high road, the one true path to a harmonious, harm-free relationship with my fellow creatures. Alongside my sweetheart, I was working the earth, reaping the fruits of our gentle labors.
Others, though, were reaping them as well.
First, we caught glimpses of a pair of fawns venturing out of the woods and into the clearing. Then we started seeing them near the stone-walled beds. We found browsed salad greens, and neatly clipped stems where tulip buds had been the day before. Cath decided the fawns needed a talking-to.
She was, I think, uniquely suited to the task. Children gravitated to her everywhere we went. She had been a nursery and elementary schoolteacher and then a professional storyteller, performing for kids in that same age range: jobs I could not do well if my life depended on it. She had loved and excelled at both. More than a decade my senior, she had also raised two fine sons who were in high school and college by the time I was on the scene. All this is to say that she knew how to deal with misbehaving youngsters.
Walking out the front door one day, she gave the twin fawns a firm but gentle lecture. While she talked, the spotted rascals stood their ground, just a couple dozen yards away. When she was done, they sauntered off, unperturbed. We saw them less and less after that. Coincidence? Perhaps.
Yet the garden ravaging continued. Were the fawns coming at night? Entirely possible. If so, however, they weren’t the only visitors. A full-grown woodchuck had begun putting in appearances in broad daylight. Here, Cath’s lectures had no discernible effect. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, our garden beds became a favorite stop on the critter’s daily rounds.
“Did woodchucks bother your grandfather’s garden?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Cath. “We ate them.”
Like me, she had grown up eating meat: beef, chicken, and pork from the grocery store her father had managed in the nearby village of Cazenovia, rabbit from the big, shedlike hutch her older brother tended out beyond the barn. And woodchuck