That winter my crib overflowed with corn — fat, healthy three-to-a-stalk ears filled with kernels from heel to tip — while my neighbors' fields yielded only brown, empty husks.

And the cage that the trained soldier had so carefully approached wasn't a cage at all—it was a crib, filled with pink blankets and a teeny, tiny, brown-haired newborn.

He found a feeding trough which he cleaned and filled with hay to use as a crib.