On day twenty-eight the first pip appeared. Kora saw it before lunch, a tiny star in a shell near the front of the nearest tray, and stood motionless for several breaths because she was afraid a movement might somehow end it. A soft chirp followed, then another. She called Leah and Caleb, left each a message when they did not answer immediately, and sat down beside the incubator to wait.
The first poult took hours to work free. Kora watched without intervening, resisting every impulse to help because she knew premature interference could do more harm than good. When the tiny bird finally emerged, damp and furious, she found herself laughing and crying at the same time. She entered the number in the log with a trembling pen: 1.
By evening, dozens of eggs had begun to tremble and crack. Through the night Kora moved between the cabinets and the prepared brooders while Leah checked the newest arrivals and supervised the transition to clean, warm housing. Caleb stayed awake on a video call from school until Kora ordered him to sleep, then called again at dawn because he had ignored her. Behind him his roommate shouted that he wanted pictures of the turkeys he had heard about for a month.
At the end of thirty-six hours, Kora and Leah counted six hundred thirteen hatchlings. The remaining sixty-two eggs had not produced poults, and the women inspected and recorded them rather than erase the loss from their books. The final number sat at the bottom of a notebook page filled with times, initials, and brief comments about each difficult hatch. Kora stared at the total until Leah gently took the pen out of her hand.
"Six hundred thirteen," Leah said. "Out of a lot they wrote off entirely."
Kora looked at the crowded brooders. A few poults were already trying to climb over their neighbors, all clumsy feet and assertive little voices. "They're going to eat me out of house and home," she whispered.
"Probably," Leah agreed. "But first you ought to be proud of what you did."
Kora was proud for a little while. She took pictures for Caleb, stood near the warm brooders listening to the chorus of new life, and let herself imagine how the farm might sound if its empty buildings were filled again. Then she opened her feed ledger and began calculating how much the birds would need as they grew. The figures climbed faster than the hope that had brought her here.
By morning she understood the new shape of her problem. She had proved the eggs could hatch. Now she had to keep 613 young birds healthy, protected, and fed long enough for somebody to be willing to pay for what they might become.