Chewing the Cud by Dick King-Smith Read Free Book Online

occasion. “Wrong sex again, eh, Myrle?” he said, and earned himself an earful from his furious daughter-in-law.
    The next morning, Sister Cartwright duly arrived, a round, comfortable, smiling person. Everything looked good at Woodlands Farm. Mother and child had had a restful night. Gladwyn and I had milked the cows. (I'd bought about ten by then. Fancy! Nowadays one man milks a hundred or more.) The horse, Bob, and Molly, first of the pigs, had been fed. The dogs lay happily about in a bedroom free of newspapers, and the kettle was being used for the understandable purpose of making tea. What was there for a newly arrived highly qualified monthly nurse to do? Hardly had she taken off her sensible belted gray tweed overcoat than Gladwyn's head came round the kitchen door.
    “The pullets!” he cried in ringing tones.
    “What? Oh Lor', what with having to fetch Sister and one thing and another, I forgot to feed them.”
    “You needn't bother now, see,” said Gladwyn.
    A couple of weeks before, I had bought a dozen fine Light Sussex pullets on the point of lay. They were housed, out in the orchard, in a homemade ex—Mobbs run thatcould be moved about over the grass. It was quite a stout contraption with a roof over it, and because it had a floor of chicken wire, I had no fears for the safety of the birds.
    What I had not bargained for was that the five-centimeter mesh of the floor netting would admit part of a long nose. A fox had scratched and scrabbled away to make a tunnel under the run and had worked his way beneath the birds. Carry them away he could not, but he had forced his muzzle through the wire time and time again and pulled and bitten at anything that came within his reach, a wing tip, a leg, a throat, as the wretches blundered about in the moonlight. Nine of the twelve lay sprawled and dead, of loss of blood or limb or of shock.
    “Look at these three, boyo,” said Gladwyn softly. “Poor buggers.” The unhappy survivors squatted with outstretched wings, their beaks wide, the nictitating membranes agitating over their reproachful eyes. In their breasts, part plucked by the urgent fox, there were gaping holes.
    “I'll hit 'em out, shall I?” said Gladwyn.
    “Yes. No, wait a minute.”
    We carried them to the kitchen, for the inspection of professional eyes.
    “What d'you think, Carty? Any chance of saving them?”
    “Easy as wink, dear. Get some newspaper on the table here. And put the kettle on.”
    And out of her little black bag came needle and surgical thread and dressings and antiseptic.
    Monday 1 March.
    St. David
    Carty arrived, sewed up three pullets.
    Fox had the other nine. To Chipping Sodbury to register Betsy's birth.

    If the Mad Hatter and the March Hare had put their heads together and planned the stocking of Woodlands Farm, the results could hardly have been more higgledypiggledy than those that I achieved all by myself. It was so when we were children, and we had graduated frombur collections of toy farm animals to actual livestock, in fact to breeding budgerigars.
    Myrle had practiced color breeding, green or cobalt or sky-blue birds confined to their separate compartments, or flights, each pair creating budgies in their own image. Male and female created they them, and all was order and neatness, Virgo-style. But in Aries' aviary, I mated everybody happily to everybody else to produce offspring of unconventional shades, rather as a child indiscriminately mixes various-colored sticks of Play-Doh and ends up with a muddy mess. Green being dominant, my flock became a collection of greenish birds with bits of blue about them, not to be compared with those Virgoan budgies. Unable to match the competition, I went in for foreign finches.
    But at Woodlands Farm I had the field, or rather the cowshed, to myself. I began to acquire a body of cattle of all shapes and colors. Anyone with any sense would have decided upon a breed and laid out every penny to fill the twenty-four standings with