In the days and nights following the attack, I imagined the winged devil stalking me, even from the sky. A Chinese pheasant rooster and two hens showed up on our farm one spring day, in 2012, and just as soon, scuttled all the plans the resident ruffed grouse had about nesting along our road. The rooster rousted them with such audacity that my wife Jackie and I later cried ‘fowl’ in its escalation. Pheasants aren’t native to our part of Minnesota, and these, it was later reported, had been released by one or more of the neighbors in an effort to establish a resident population. We had seen a few nearby, over the years, but I don’t think they survived our severely cold winters, and all the predators that still exist up here. Jackie and her son, John, sighted the rooster and his hens, three weeks before I did, seeing them usually after I had gone to work in the afternoons. It was during the weekend, when the rooster bol...