Down on the Farm

The oviraptors are herded into the chute by Tiffin. Tiffin is a black and white border collie, but she doesn’t have any problem transferring herding instincts from sheep to dinosaurs. The oviraptors click at each other when they’re distressed and the yard sounds like a geiger counter. It smells musky and faintly of ammonia, the familiar oviraptor smell, although they aren’t dirty creature. They groom like cats.

Or maybe more like pigeons, if the pigeons had almost no feathers. I grab the oviraptor at the head of the chute, hoisting her into the air by the tail, and swipe hormone gel across her cloaca and then let her go. Ravished, she scuttles towards the egg house, hormonally activated to lay eggs for another month.

It’s a strange way to make a living.

It helps to be quick, because the oviraptors are, and their muzzles are more like beaks than soft things and they hurt when they get you. Funky looking things, sort of like dwarf, leathery skinned ostriches with eyebrows and ridge crests of thin feathers. People are always surprised at how birdlike they are. Of course, the truth is that birds are really dinosaurlike.

It’s not a moment when I want my cell phone to ring. “Sabiston Eggs,” I say.

“Grace Sabiston?”

“Yeah?” I hold the phone between my chin and my ear and grab a brindle dinosaur tail and haul it up into the air to swipe hormone gel on it’s ass.

“This is Bobby Kestler.”

Bobby Kestler is one of my distributors. He doesn’t usually call me at seven-fifteen in the morning but distributors, like farmers, start their days early. “Grace? I have to cancel my orders.”

The next oviraptor screeches just then. “What did you say?” I ask, grimly holding up a squirming oviraptor. My right arm is really much stronger than it used to be but I’m getting bursitis. “You have to cancel an order?”

“No,” he says, “all my orders. The FDA just put a moratorium on food products from genetically induced animals.”

“Fuck,” I say. “Bobby, they can’t do that. What are they going to do about things like ever-ripe tomatoes? Tobacco mosaic resistant cantaloupe?”

“Vegetables aren’t animals,” Bobby says. “Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve got make a bunch of calls.”

“What about cows?” I say. “They genetically modify cows. They genetically modify everything.”

“Genetic modification is one thing, creating species is another, at least according to the FDA.”

“Hell, half the DNA in my oviraptors isn’t even from dinosaurs, its from chickens.”

“Grace,” Bobby says, exasperated, “I’m not the goddamn FDA, argue with them.”

The connection clicks in my ear.

Tiffin is looking expectant. The line has stopped moving. For a workaholic border collie, this is a crisis. “Tiffin,” I say and she c ocks her head, “this is just the beginning.”

Seven years ago I got a pair of oviraptors as pets. Their names were Fred and Wilma. I had a good job in the marketing department of a huge international corporation that made medical products like baby shampoo and telepresence surgical instruments and I could afford to blow money on a couple of dinosaurs.

They were so ugly they were cute. The male, Fred, was a brindle and the line of feathers on his eyeridges gave him a perpetually sardonic look. He and Wilma successfully bred a clutch of seven long pale brown leathery eggs and I ended up with seven down covered dinosaur chicks which I sold for $2200 a piece. Then my company moved most of its North American operations to Brazil and Ireland to save the cost of paying North American wages, I was out of a job, and the long-necked scaly things with their unexpected feathers on the eyeridges and crests were my bread and butter.

Needless to say, I couldn’t live off of Fred and Wilma, so I bought some more females and a good breeding male who happened to be brindle. Sabiston Dinosaurs bred a lot of brindle oviraptors. A restaurant in Berekely called Allegro non Tropo contacted me to find out if I knew a source of eggs for them, and then I went into the egg business. First in a little way, now in a medium sized way. I’m not agribusiness. I’m not rows of gleaming combines. I’m just me and a bunch of oviraptors and some part time help. And a lot of financing.

About mid-morning I call my lawyer, who says he really doesn’t have the expertise for dealing with the FDA but he’ll see who he can put on it. While I’m on the phone to my lawyer, Allegro non Tropo calls and leaves me a message asking me if I’ve heard about the FDA ban. While I am on the phone with Sarah at Allegro non Tropo I get voice mail messages from a half-a-dozen other customers.

Eventually a guy named Becker Doogan calls me from a huge lawfirm called James, Daws, Riser, and Clough. “I’ve just been talking to Freida Kostner,” he says, “your attorney. I do Regulatory work and she told me about your dinosaurs.”

I’m holding the phone to my ear and typing ‘Becker Doogan’ into my system, which is filling my idle time while it’s searching for information beyond that he is employed by James, Daws, Riser and Clough to tell me that James, Daws, Riser, and Clough has offices in New York, L.A., Washington D.C., Miami Beach, Fla., Paris, Hong Kong, Riyadh, etc., etc. It also tells me that James, Daws, Riser, and Clough underwrite the PBS broadcasts of two news shows and a multimedia public broadcast on the Net called Access. “I don’t think I can afford you,” I say. “You know this is basically a chicken ranch.”

“I thought it was dinosaurs,” he says.

“Chickens are modern-day dinosaurs,” I say. “All birds are. Every Thanksgiving, America sits down and carves up the Thanksgiving dinosaur.”

“Makes you wonder if the stuffing is appropriate,” he says.

Which makes me like him a little. A good thing because I’ve got a picture from James, Daws and all showing a remarkably young and handsome man with glasses and renaissance hair and beryl drop earring. He’s some sort of lawyerly cross between late release and dependable and mostly he looks sort of like I imagine Benjamin Disraeli would look. I saw a miniseries on Benjamin Disraeli. I wonder if it was underwritten by James, Daws and all the rest.

“I was thinking that AgriGene might be interested in funding some legal action with the FDA,” he says. AgriGene holds the patent on my oviraptors. “How about if I check and get back to you?”

“Is contacting AgriGene considered billable hours?” I ask.

He looks pained. “No,” he says, “I guess not.”

“Contact ‘em, then,” I say. Why not?

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