SOMETHING WAS KILLING THE CHICKENS. It crept into the barn in the hours between nightfall and dawn and took the laying hens a few at a time. You could see where it had dragged the dead or dying birds, because of the trail of feathers that lay pell-mell, as though someone had ripped open a down pillow and shaken it vigorously, scattering feathers into the air and leaving them where they fell. There were no tracks, not yet, but the predator's modus operandi seemed fairly clear. It slipped in from the outside by going under the gutter cleaner, a contraption designed to remove manure from the barn on a conveyor chain, and took an immediate left turn into an area that was set aside for the laying hens. Here the hens -- a cacophony of Araucanas, Black Minorcas, White Leghorns, Barred Rocks, and Golden Comets -- ate, drank, socialized, squabbled, brooded, and laid their eggs. It was hard to tell whether it was killing the birds there and moving them, or seizing birds that happened to be roosting elsewhere -- near the sheep or pig pens, or in what Jennifer called the Old Barn, a cluttered, cobwebby area of boxes and wood and wire mesh and wheelbarrows that was, even in the hottest weather, damp and cool.

It was the height of summer, late July 2003. The predator was determined and crafty and apparently hungry, with the advantages of stealth and darkness on its side. It had come nearly every night for close to twenty-one nights. It had begun by killing a few hens that were incautious enough to move outside at dawn, before daylight swept any nocturnal predators back to their haunts. At first Jennifer had suspected an owl, because of the way the heads were ripped off and because the chickens were free-range and could move around at will, inside or out, leaving them susceptible to a silent, diving attack from the air. (Chickens, although largely flightless, can run with surprising, herky-jerky, silent-film speed, but not quickly enough to escape an owl or a hawk swooping out of the sky.)

But when the killing continued unabated, and the manner of it changed beyond decapitation -- the chickens' backs broken and eaten out, the profusion of feathers -- Jennifer and her husband, Kyle, began to suspect raccoons. They'd talked to a man who knew and hunted raccoons and he told them, No, raccoons aren't killers, they're scavengers; something else is killing your birds. But Jennifer and Kyle weren't persuaded. Every morning, at daybreak, Jennifer would come down to the barn to do chores, and every morning, there were more dead birds, or what was left of them, scattered on the ground. In five years of farming, Jennifer and Kyle had never had such a serious predator problem and if they couldn't get it, it might well kill every single bird they had.

Whatever it was, was an opportunist. Not content with the chickens, it had gone on to kill poults (young turkeys) kept in the Old Barn, near the stalls that held the two horses, Michael, an Anglo-Arabian, and Bobby, a Suffolk Punch draft horse. The poults were housed in a large wire-mesh crate, with a waterer and a grain trough. There had been fifty of them to start with, Broad-breasted White Turkeys that had been shipped through the U.S. mail and were picked up at the post office like any other package. They'd arrived in June, one day old, and would be ready for slaughter, at twenty weeks of age, just before Thanksgiving.

Jennifer and Kyle had already suffered previous losses earlier in the summer when, in one of those freakish accidents that can occur in farming, seventeen poults had piled on top of each other to the point of suffocation. The poults were small and white, with pink beaks and bright unblinking eyes. They were spindly and vulnerable looking and curious, with a way of tilting their heads and elongating their skinny necks when they looked at you, as if conveniently offering themselves up for slaughter. They sent up little peeps of alarm when you approached, and for protection massed together in a great feathery ball.

But they were guileless enough that when whatever killed them walked up to their crate, they stuck their heads out through the mesh to see what was going on. At which point the predator decapitated them. That was one theory, anyway, judging by the headless bodies scattered inside the crate. The second theory was that the predator simply reached in between the mesh and swiped at them with a paw. They were, after all, rather like fish in a barrel, and the predator got ten of them. Ten dead turkeys: approximately $600 lost in revenue at Thanksgiving, on top of the losses incurred when the other poults suffocated.

In desperation, Jennifer and Kyle borrowed from a trapper two Conibear traps -- the kind that would kill the animal instantly -- and two leg-hold traps and placed them carefully at the animal's most likely points of entry, with stern admonitions to their three-year-old son, Brad, to NEVER go near them. But the animal was too clever, and either ignored the traps or set them off, without itself being caught. "The minute we put those things up, it knew," Jennifer said.

After that failure, Jennifer and Kyle instituted a kind of prison lockdown-every entrance and exit, every nook and cranny, that could be sealed, was sealed. Nothing could get in or out. For a while that seemed to work, but when Jennifer left Vermont for a few days at the end of July, to visit her sister, Anna, in West Virginia, she took down the traps because she didn't want to endanger her cats, who had the tendency to wander in and out, and it returned. From early July through the end of the first week in August, the predator had killed thirty-five out of fifty laying hens, and the ten turkeys. This was a significant loss for a small operation like Fat Rooster Farm, and not one that could be easily recouped. And they still didn't know, for certain, what IT was.

Then one day it left tracks. At the entrance to the henhouse, almost directly under a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placard that read BIRD NESTING AREA: PLEASE DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS SIGN!, you could, if you bent down and looked closely, see blurred animal prints left behind in the sawdust that was put down to keep the barn smelling relatively sweet. More tellingly, there was the distinctive, unmistakable impression of a raccoon's paw -- vaguely webbed and about the size and shape of a baby's foot-in the dust on top of one of the four lidded garbage cans that contained grain and stood directly outside the partition to the henhouse. The raccoon had clambered up onto it to get at the collected eggs that Kyle, whose job it was to gather them, typically left in a hanging basket above the cans. It had broken the eggs, probably with its teeth, sucked out the yolks and whites, and left a debris field of shells behind.

Short of putting in a surveillance camera, this was as telling a confirmation of its identity as you could hope for. But identification was not the same as apprehension. Not only was the raccoon decimating the flock of laying hens and the turkeys, but there was another point of vulnerability for which Kyle had special concern: row upon row of sweet corn down in the fields below the barn, growing fast and thick and tall in the summer heat, and given an additional powerful spur by July's heavy rain. There were people who swore up and down that, when the conditions were right, you could literally hear the corn grow overnight-a rustling sound as if the wind were blowing through the papery stalks-and now the conditions were right.

For raccoons, who love the plump, sugary kernels of sweet corn, stumbling on such a harvest at its peak would be impossible to resist, akin to the career criminal discovering that the vaults at Fort Knox have been left unattended. They could easily make short work of the corn crop in one or two nights, which, given the high demand for Fat Rooster corn at farmers' markets and the local co-ops, would be a very bad thing -- as if the loss of the hens and turkeys wasn't bad enough.

These are the contingencies for which a farmer may intellectually plan-mortality rates in livestock, a certain percentage of crop loss, vagaries of weather -- but when something actually goes wrong, or threatens to go wrong in a hurry, taking a portion of your livelihood with it, it feels as though a solution can't come quickly enough.

So Jennifer took out Kyle's 20-gauge shotgun that was kept in the cellar and went down into the barn and sat in a chair and waited for the raccoon to show itself. It didn't come the first night, and it didn't come the second night when Kyle sat watch, although at one point Kyle thought he saw something furry that might be a raccoon peering into the barn and then retreating when it spotted him. On the third night, the night of August 6, which was clear and balmy, Kyle went down into the barn again. He sat facing the henhouse, arms crossed across his chest, shotgun laid across his knees, legs planted firmly apart, looking like a homesteader in a Western, the kind of man who sits out on his porch waiting for the cattle rustlers to appear on the horizon.

Jennifer and Kyle had already moved the hens out of the henhouse as a precaution, but that had not stopped the killing. Some of the hens had taken to huddling near the cow stalls, under the one bare bulb that was always on at night, taking shelter within that small circle of light, looking around anxiously at any unexpected noise, clucking to themselves. They were being gunned for, and they knew it. Still others roosted up in the haymow -- the upper, vaulted part of the barn where baled hay was stored-sending up squawks of warning when a stranger passed by. The barn was empty except for the hens, the pigs, and Blackberry Stem, a Jersey calf the color of cafe au lait, which was being housed there indefinitely by a neighbor. The sheep were out at pasture, as were the cows.

The stage was set, but the barn couldn't be called quiet. It creaked, the hens muttered, the calf shifted restlessly in its stall, twisting its head around to look at Kyle, and the sows-Cookie, Old Spot, and the truculent sow known as White Pig-vied for the best sleeping spots. Three six-hundred-pound sows in competition for optimum position in one pen, even a large pen, do not go gently into the night. There were sporadic eruptions of testy, ill-tempered, stubborn squealing while the sows changed position.

Kyle stared fixedly at the gutter cleaner, where they had determined the raccoon had been entering and exiting. It was hard to see, straining to look at what could be something or might be nothing, ears sifting through the range of noises that the barn could produce -- bangs, clatters, snuffles, sighs, and whispers. Harder still to stay awake when you've been up at dawn, squatting on the ground, harvesting beans and tomatoes and corn and chard and cucumbers and peppers and then taking them to farmers' market.

If he did see the raccoon and he was able to get off a shot in time, it would sound, in this small enclosure, like the roar of a cannon, and scare the hell out of the animals, not to mention humans, which is why he wore the kind of protective earpieces a construction worker uses to muffle noise. The first night, when Jennifer had been leaving her watch, walking the short distance from the barn to the house, she had accidentally discharged the shotgun and that had been loud enough and shocking enough to wake Kyle out of a sound sleep and send him stumbling down the stairs and out into the yard to see whether Jennifer had shot the raccoon or herself. Neither, as it turned out.

On the third night, he sat in the barn for an hour and a half, eyelids drooping lower and lower into sleep, and finally gave up. If it hadn't shown itself just after dusk, it probably wouldn't come again until dawn, its favored hours of predation. Dramatic logic dictated that on the third night the raccoon would appear, and that the shotgun introduced in the first act would be fired by the third, but raccoons don't operate on dramatic, or human, logic, and it clearly knew enough to outwait the human waiting for it. No, if they were going to catch the raccoon, it wouldn't be this night.

But, the next morning, when Jennifer went down to do the chores, she found it: in the henhouse, in a live-catch trap that they'd borrowed from a neighbor and used as a last resort. Jennifer had driven over to Bethel's U-Save Discount Grocery and picked up some dented cans of mackerel to use as bait. Wriggling her way in and out of the 4-foot cage, which was not easy to do, even with her small, wiry frame, she'd smeared the trap liberally with the mackerel, which smelled to high heaven, and then, to disguise the fact that it was a trap, she'd piled hay high against its sides, leaving nothing exposed but the very top. And it had worked. Here IT was. Caught.

"Hello, you sonofabitch," Jennifer bellowed. The raccoon had killed thirty-five chickens and ten turkeys and had terrorized the remaining birds, and yet it looked quite small and tense in its cage, gathered tightly into itself, eyes wary, not particularly murderous looking, and unexpectedly and against all reason, she felt sorry for it. But sentimentality is for people who don't farm, and who aren't confronted, as farmers are daily, with the inescapable, inconvenient, messy realities of life and death. There seems to be a general rule of thumb that the farther removed you are from nature and from the necessity of having to earn a living from it, the more sentimental and romantic you are likely to be about it -- as if farms should operate on the same principles as a children's petting zoo or a show farm, where the animals are always docile and always smell sweet and never grow to maturity, always stay playful and fleecy and downy and snuggly, and are never slaughtered for meat or because they are injured or sick or worn out or just too damn mean.

It was all well and good to say that the raccoon was just being a raccoon, and following its instincts, and this was part of the larger Darwinian imperative, and let it alone, but it had taken forty-five largely helpless birds with it -- birds that, over hundreds of years, had had the ability to fly, to escape, bred out of them by man. The chickens no more wanted to be victims of the raccoon than Jennifer and Kyle wanted them to be. Intervention was required. The raccoon had chased and caught, and now it, in turn, had been chased and caught. If you let it go, even miles away, it would come back to the food source, because clearly it knew a good thing when it saw it, and the killing would start all over again, and this Jennifer and Kyle could not allow. They had invested too much time and money and labor in the chickens to see them picked off one by one.

So they'd made an arrangement: a man who had a permit to hunt raccoon was going to take it miles away and let his dogs get its scent; then he would let the raccoon go in the woods and the dogs would attempt to tree it or run it to earth, and that would likely be the end of the raccoon. There was some kind of rough justice here. In return, the farm was not troubled any further that summer by the raccoon, or any other predator.