The Cow-Pie Chronicles (4 page)

Tim soon found himself standing in the feed loft and looking out the door at the dusty barnyard more than 10 feet below. Just like the TV hero, he tied the rope around his waist, tossed it over a rafter and pulled it tight. Then, on accident, one of his feet slipped past the edge of the door! He froze. That's when he realized it was a very long way down!
Maybe I'm not the hero type after all
, he thought.

While Tim was having second thoughts about trying the rope trick, Dana came into the barn. She walked across the creaky wooden floor and looked up at him.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

What could Tim say? “I'm chickening out,” certainly wouldn't do. Then he had an idea.

“Playing the elevator game,” Tim said. He pulled down on the rope until the end tied around his waist was tight. “The way you play is that you step out, lower yourself to the ground and then pull yourself back up using this here rope,” he explained. He didn't tell her he hadn't tried it yet.

“Sounds like fun! I wanna try!” Dana said, running upstairs to the loft.

“
Well, I don't know. Mom might get mad. Remember when we went swimming in the
water
trough
and you told her about it?” Tim asked.

Standing next to Tim, Dana stared at him. “I won't tell, I promise!” she said.

Tim decided to use her begging as an opportunity to take care of one more problem. “And if I let you try this, you promise to quit talking about moving to town?”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“Fine,” Dana said.

“Okay. I'm getting tired of pulling myself up and down anyway,” Tim said, fibbing.

Tim loosened the rope from around his waist and slipped it off. He then tied it tightly around Dana's waist. He couldn't have his little sister slipping out halfway down—that would cancel any “don't-tell” promise for sure!

Tugging on the rope one more time to make sure everything was working, and grabbing tight to his end, he asked Dana, “Are you ready?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, now step off slowly,” Tim instructed, “and then you want to . . . N-o-o-o!”

To Tim's complete surprise, Dana jumped out the loft door! Her sudden weight on the rope caused it to rip through Tim's hands, badly burning his palms. He instantly let go, clenching his hands to stop the pain. Then he heard a loud
thud
in the barnyard below the open door. His heart stopped.
Oh, crud!

Tim looked out the door, and then down. There was Dana, flat on her back. A billowing cloud of dust surrounded her as she lay motionless. A moment later, she came to life and shot up to her feet, screaming, “I can't breathe! You killed me! You killed me!” She raced to the house with the rope trailing behind her. “Mom! Mom! He killed me! Mom!”

Tim was scared. His dad had swatted him hard on his butt for kicking Skipper. If he got in that much trouble for kicking the dog, he could only imagine what punishment he'd receive for killing his sister! Not wanting to find out, Tim decided to hide from his parents and Dana in his secret fort in the hayloft.

For hours, Tim sat inside that hot, dark little room built of fresh-cut bales of hay. When his growling stomach told him
supper
 
was fast approaching, he began to think about the elevator game differently. He reasoned that Dad was upset about him kicking the dog because the dog could hunt. But in this case, Dana couldn't hunt. In fact, Tim couldn't think of one useful thing she did on the farm.
Maybe Dad won't be too upset
...

Tim wasn't about to die of hunger worrying about a punishment. He climbed down from the hayloft and left the barn. Just then, Dad drove up on the tractor and spotted his son walking toward the house.

“Where've you been? Supper's waiting,” Dad said, with a smile on his face. He didn't seem upset at all.

Wow. He must really love that dog!
Tim thought.

Tim ran to the house, opened the door, stepped into the kitchen and froze in his tracks. There sat Dana at the kitchen table, stuffing her mouth with food. She looked up at Tim and flashed him a devilish smile. Tim knew instantly that in order to keep his little sister quiet, he was doomed to grant her every wish for a month—at least!

Back to Table of Contents

Chapter 5

The next morning, Tim decided it was best to avoid any outdoor activity with Dana for a while. After accidently dropping her out of the loft the day before, he figured her promise to stop talking about living in town was history. Because he didn't want to hear about moving at all, that was even more of a reason to play by himself once his morning chores were done.

The problem was that besides his sister, Tim didn't have many choices for playmates. He decided his best shot for any entertainment was to pay a visit to the neighbor's bull.

A bull, which is a male cow, is one animal in farm life rarely associated with fun. Bulls tended to have well-earned reputations for being violent. Nevertheless, without getting trampled,
gored
or chased, Tim knew how to have fun with the neighbor's beast.

The first rule in Tim's game was to keep the farm's high-powered electric fence between himself and the beast at all times. The electrical part of the fence consisted of two skinny, bare wires hanging loosely from white
insulators
attached to little metal poles. The lower wire was two feet above the ground and the second wire, two feet higher. While both wires looked harmless and the electricity running through them wasn't strong enough to kill a human or large animal, the fence packed enough of a
wallop
 
to back off a snorting 1,000-pound bull stalking a rival bull on the other side.

Tim hated electric fences. But what he hated the most was when Dad told him to open one of the gates. The gate latches consisted of a sliding wooden handle over a spring—to open it, Tim had to push the spring until the wire was loose enough to unhook one end. And he had to remember to never touch the electric wire—ever. But poor Tim never got the hang of opening the gate and always got zapped. When this happened, Tim would drop the handle and run away. His dad either laughed or yelled at him as he climbed off the tractor to open the gate himself.

For some time, there had been a small
feud
going on between the Slingers and the owner of the bull. The bull loved the Slinger's cornfield and would always reach over or through the fence to treat himself to a corn lunch. Mr. Slinger demanded the neighbor pay him $20 for crop damage done by the animal, but the neighbor said that was crazy and refused to pay. Instead, the neighbor added a $300 electric fence to the existing fence between his pasture and the Slinger's cornfield. That didn't make sense to Tim—paying $280 more just to make a point—but he realized that sometimes adults didn't make much sense when pride was at stake.

Tim found the feud between his dad and the neighbor amusing and didn't want to see a little thing like the addition of an electric fence end the war. So he walked along the fence line, trying to figure out a plan to help the bull enjoy another corn lunch.
Maybe I can find a loose post and pull it out
...

The beast saw Tim and approached him. Tim continued to walk and the bull walked with him, but on the other side of the electric fence, of course. Big and black with a ring in his nose, bloodshot eyes and drool running down from his mouth, the bull was so large that the ground shuddered with every step he took. Feeling the vibrations, Tim decided his original plan to pull out a fence post was a really bad one. So he tried thinking of something else.

The bull and Tim continued walking together, eyeing each other suspiciously across the fence, wondering what was on each other's minds. Then the bull stopped—there was a stalk of corn bent over, right next to the fence. Very carefully, and avoiding the electric wires, the bull turned his head sideways, stuck it through the fence, bit down on the stalk and yanked it back to his side of the fence.

“Brilliant!” Tim said aloud. He wondered why he had not thought of that. With glee, Tim bent more stalks of Slinger corn toward the fence then stepped back to watch. The beast ate and ate and ate until he was full. Then he wandered away.
This is gonna be good
, Tim thought to himself as he hurried back to the farm to tell his dad the corn thief had struck again.

Upon hearing the news, Mr. Slinger immediately went to inspect the damage. Returning to the house later, he was angry. He jumped into his old pickup truck and tore down the road, gravel flying everywhere, on his way to the neighbor's house.

Not wanting to miss anything, Tim ran back to the pasture. He found the two men standing at the scene of the crime.

“
Look at this! There's at least a
bushel
of corn gone,” Tim's dad said to the neighbor.

“There's no way my bull could reach those stalks!” the neighbor said.

As luck would have it, the beast wandered back to grab a little desert. Right in front of the two men and Tim, the bull stuck his head between the electric wires, not touching either one. He bit off another stalk of corn, pulled it back through and ate it.

Both men were surprised and shocked by the bull's
resourcefulness
. Tim's dad smiled because he was right and the neighbor was wrong. The neighbor frowned and without saying a word to either Mr. Slinger or Tim, stormed off across the pasture.

* * *

Later in the day, near
dusk
, Tim went to see if there were any new developments in the corn
caper
. The beast was standing near the same spot Tim had earlier served him a corn lunch. But something was different. The beast had a new accessory—a necklace made of a length of
logging
chain
, with one strand hanging down almost to the ground. The bull looked at Tim then at the corn.

“Can you believe the adults think they're so smart,” Tim said to the bull. “They try to ruin our fun with a piece of chain, huh? We'll show them.” Tim bent a stalk of corn all the way over so it nearly touched the fence, and then stepped back. As he had done in the past, the beast moved forward, turned his head and stuck it through the fence to grab the corn.