Quail

quail
verb, intransitive. To feel or show fear or apprehension. Also a noun.

Mike was devoted to his livestock. Day after day, he brought kitchen discards home from the restaurant where he worked and fed them to his pigs. He delighted in seeing their response when he dumped buckets of cabbage cores and melon rinds into their trough. They never dived into their dry food and fought over it as they did over the restaurant scraps. Their robust growth was almost visible, and he knew all those fruits and vegetables would turn into succulent chops and hams.

He sought nourishing weeds to supplement the commercial chicken feed, as well. He knew that green food is what turns the yolks a deep orange when chickens lay eggs. There was plenty of poke and wild amaranth growing on the property, and he took time to chop some of it up and throw it into the chickens' run every day. Once, when his wife was cutting up a head of broccoli for their dinner, he shouldered her aside and began cutting the stem into small cubes that he could give his poultry.

"I'm not sure you understand, Betty," he told her as he scooped them into a pail. "I actually love the chickens."

With dismay, he saw the hens quail when he approached with those nourishing tidbits and run into their house to hide. He wanted them to love him back.


Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.