Snowball's Chance by John Reed Read Free Book Online

hated their mistreatment now, when it was owned by the pigs. It was all the same to them. And as much as the militant Diso was feared and even resented by much of the Woodlands population, there was still that incontrovertible thing—waterflow was their right.
    As of late, the intelligence that Diso had collected on the Pig Farm was particularly comprehensive. Moses, who regularly reported to Diso on all three of the nincompoop farms, had been explicit in his account of the recent changes that were now taking place on the Pig Farm—under the dictate of the pig Minimus, and more importantly, the pig Snowball.
    Also, there were the rats, who, always back and forth between the Woodlands and the three farms (based upon wherever life was easiest at the moment), could be relied upon for the most up-to-date news. Rats, though they had nearly no long-term memories, had excellent short-term memories—virtually photographic. And thus, they made exceptional spies and saboteurs—as they could be told anything about the past, and they would believe it, and they would do anything for you, and then forget it. The only problem with rats was that they were so greedy for chicken eggs, peanut butter, and coconut strips smeared with limburger, that they wouldn’t stop at making things up or exaggerating their tales to increase a dividend.
    But despite the weaknesses of the sources—from the greed of the rats to the vagueness of Moses, who, though highly esteemed, was not known for his directness—the beavers, by their extremely technical minds, felt they could sort it all out. The beaver brain, suited to a task socomplex as to go beyond the wildest arrogant imaginings of any other animal (that task being dam-building), was uniquely adapted to sifting variant information into a cosmological entirety—an entirety that went all the way back to that time only Moses remembered, when beavers oversaw a village in harmony with the universe.…
    “Up there,” Moses would point into the night sky—
    “Up there you see the Lodestar of Sugarcandy, where, for every righteous beaver, 1600 virgin birch saplings await.”
    And accordingly, being the chosen population of the Lodestar, and having for years had both Moses and their diverse intelligence operations, the beavers supposed that they had a pretty good grasp of things—one that was getting better every day. (At that time of earthly departure, this on-going striving for clarity would surely, and promptly so, plop a soul on the Lodestar.) And with the new information that had been provided by Moses, the Pig Farm, to the beaver’s way of thinking, was not only the most reprehensible of the Woodlands enemies, but also the most well-understood.
    The hypocrite pig!
    Nevertheless, at the moment, as much as the beavers hated the Pig Farm, Foxwood and Pinchfield were far more dangerous foes. Like Foxwood and Pinchfield, the Pig Farm bombed the beaver dams. But unlike Foxwood and Pinchfield, the Pig Farm did not engage in hunting, or trapping. More specifically, the Pig Farm did not engage in the horrific but highly profitable fur-trade. Diso favored the assumption that this was merely an oversight of the pigs. Yet, Diso could not deny the undeniable—the Pig Farm had not been responsible for the continuing andsenseless brutality. The Pig Farm was a newish regime, while, for as long as anyone could remember, Foxwood and Pinchfield had been relentless in their policy of stripping the Woodlands of every conceivable resource. A policy that was so far reaching as to peel the pelt from an animal’s back. Just the previous season, nine beavers had been lost—to that vile, devilish pastime of transforming animals beautiful, brilliant, and loving, into coats.
    Based upon this, through secret dispatches conveyed by Moses the raven, a tenuous alliance had been formed with the Pig Farm—an alliance that, however fragile, had lasted several seasons. Because of the swine’s longstanding struggle against their