Peas and Carrots

The farmer went away yesterday and today we got a long pointed lecture on the subject of "Taking Advantage."

How would we like it if someone took advantage of us? Would we think that was so all-fired hilarious? Would we?

This is all on account of the farmer making the same mistake over and over. When the farmer goes out of town the farmer tells the guest feeder, just put the feed in the stalls and out in the back paddock and open up the gates and they will all run in and they will go into their separate stalls where the feed is and then all you have to do is close all the gates and then go take a nap, it as as easy as peas and carrots. The main thing is just be sure to stand back out of the way so you don't get run over because they pick up quite a little head of steam when they are running toward their dinner. The steam part is true, I admit that.

Well Lori was the guest feeder yesterday and she had just bought a new car and that used up most of her wits and she was looking a little bit haywire from overexposure to car salesmen by the time she got here, and I have to say when you see someone looking haywire you can't always necessarily stay on the straight and narrow and somehow all of us at the same time decided to go the extra mile. And so instead of going into any of our stalls properly like the farmer had guaranteed some of us ran a diversion stampede toward the feed room and some went part way up the stairs and some went into the stalls and then ran right back out and some galloped toward the alfalfa stack like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and before long Lori had to call for reinforcements and the way she was looking I was frankly surprised that she could still operate a cellphone.

Well it turned out that she was calling the kindly neighbor who has already seen every goat trick in the book so the joke was on us and before long we were all latched inside the stalls - not necessarily our own stalls -- where we had time to reconsider our activities.

And sure enough, the lecture we got this morning was long and sorrowful and filled with withering pauses. The farmer hoped we were happy.

"We are," said Cherry.

"Yes," agreed Abby.

And the farmer hoped we would think about what we had done.

"I'm not going to," said Betty.

"Me neither," agreed Winjay.

"I don't have time for that," said Big Orange. "I think I might be coming in heat."