Clara Belle the farmer's pet yearling kept getting bigger and bigger. She was supposed to kid but she held off. The barometer dropped and there was a downpour but she held off, getting bigger and bigger. Crumpet meanwhile spent every day spying through her peephole and when the new babies would be let out to play she would squirt through the fence and gallop to the barn and t-bone each and every one of them in rapid succession, Muhammad Ali style, float like a butterfly sting like a bee.
The farmer was losing patience.
Crumpet did her t-boning practice for 3 days with complete success, dominating all the week-old babies. Once she had fully dominated she would give three little sideways hops signifying her badness. That's right -- hop, hop, hop -- I'm bad. The farmer caught her and stuffed her back through the fence a few times when she got too full of herself but in general she ran rampant.
On the fourth day she decided to go Big. She surveyed the pasture and picked out Moony, who may be big - she is the biggest yearling here, and possibly in the world, since she still drinks a gallon of Pinky milk every day - but she is also slow, uncoordinated, and not an intellectual giant.
Crumpet did her first big league t-boning when Pinky and Moony both got their heads stuck in the fence. They had put their heads through the same hole at the same time and couldn't get out. They didn't notice it at first, they thought they were just waiting for everyone to get off the bus and then they could go where they wanted to go, but when everyone else left and they still couldn't move and the farmer said, "well, you figured out a way to get your heads in there, I think you can figure out a way to get out," they started moaning softly, like they were in a sad church or something.
It was very spiritual.
Crumpet got a gleam in her eye and she started t-boning Moony to such an extent that even though it was a fly attacking an elephant, the farmer had to come down and get Moony and Pinky out of the fence and the farmer attempted at that time to catch Crumpet because Crumpet had been promised a long-overdue thrashing but Crumpet dodged away.
Tiny Tyrant 1, Moony 0.
"All right," said the farmer to Clara Belle, "you go ahead and have your kids whenever you want just do not have them in the middle of the night. It is not allowed."
Later that day, at midnight actually, Clara Belle laid down and started screaming.
The farmer came trotting with the kidding towels.
"Ok," said the farmer, rubbing the first one, a big starry-eyed buckling.
"Why it's called Midnight," the farmer explained to Clara Belle as she pushed out another buckling, also big and starry-eyed, "is that it comes in the middle of the night."
Clara gulped down a quart of grape-flavored Emergen-C in a bucket.
"And that isn't allowed, as I explained earlier."
The bucklings looked exactly like their father, Lucky the Drive-Through Buck, right down to the last detail, swanky and blue-eyed with lush black-and-white coats, like they were on their way to hear Frank Sinatra crooning somewhere. They were tiny, but they were giants.
Crumpet surveyed them with satisfaction through her spyhole. Two more worthy opponents.
They might be giants, thought Crumpet, but they are no match for me.
