BRAD LEGG WAS PACKING UP HIS PEACOCKS AT THE END OF an animal auction in Nebraska when a boy approached him with a polite question.
“Mr. Legg,” he said, “I’ve got a peacock, and I don’t know what it is. If I told you the colors, could you tell me?”
Legg was the obvious person to ask about a strange peacock even back then, in the autumn of 1998. The regulars at the auctions in Tennessee and Ohio and Kansas, anywhere within driving distance of Legg’s Missouri farm, were used to seeing him pull in with a trailer full of peafowl—black shoulders and whites, Spaldings and cameos and plain old India blues. In the peafowl world—peafowl being the collective noun for peacocks, peahens, and peachicks—Legg was a celebrity: A few years earlier, one of his birds had appeared on the cover of The Peacock Journal (“a national peafowl and alternative livestock publication”). It was a silver pied, believed to have been the first of its kind hatched in North America.
“Sure I could,” Legg said to the boy. “What’s it look like?”
Green neck, the boy told him, cinnamon body, pastel train, kind of pale.
Probably misidentifying a purple peacock, Legg thought. Maybe a cameo. But the boy said no, he’d seen pictures of both, and his bird wasn’t either. The boy’s father happened along. He confirmed the description and said he’d never seen anything like it.
Legg’s pulse quickened. “Do you have any pictures?”
“No, sir.”
Legg’s son Brandon looked up at him. He was ten years old. “Dad,” he whispered, “we gotta go see it.”
It was six o’clock on a Sunday night. The drive home took five hours; Brandon and his sister had school in the morning; their mom, Patsy, had to go to work; and Legg had to be at the Fuji plant, his real job, making sure a few thousand rolls of film were properly processed. And he was still packing up the birds, more than a dozen, that he hadn’t sold because the bids came in too low.
Legg looked at the boy’s father. “How far away do you live?”
They drove ninety minutes northwest, away from Missouri and
