"Thank you for that riveting piece of trivia, Arlo."
He touched the brim of his hat and shuffled back toward his property with the unhurried gait of a man who’d done his part and was content with it.
Tessa looked at the eggs in her hands, then at the north fence line, which she could just barely see stretching along the far edge of the pasture down by the lake. It looked fine from here. The posts were standing. The wire fencing stretched between them. What was there to check?
She shrugged and went back to collecting eggs.
Wednesday morning at five forty-five, she was woken by Loretta's braying, which made a rooster to crowing at dawn sound like a soothing lullaby. Tessa suspected the donkey did specifically to torment her. She groaned and rolled out of bed, got dressed in one of her hideous T-shirts, and headed downstairs, half-asleep.
With every step down the stairs, she felt colder. She craved another couple of hours of sleep in her nice warm bed almost more than she could resist. But she had animals to look after and pictures to shoot today.
Coffee. She needed a big shot of caffeine in the worst way.
She rounded the corner into the kitchen and stopped in her tracks. Was this a dream? She pinched her own forearm hard enough to leave a red mark to test the theory that she was asleep.
Oww.
Nope. She was wide awake.
And Maple the blind goat was standing in the middle of Fern's kitchen.
Maple stood on Fern's braided kitchen rug, bleating softly, her blank white eyes aimed at nothing, her stubby tail wagging hopefully. She obviously was lost and needed help. Poor thing.
Maple's guide dog, Captain, had taken to sleeping at the foot of Makayla's bed the past few nights, and the goat must've followed the scent of him up here to the house. But how the goat had gotten out of the pasture to wander up here? And how had she opened the back door?
Tessa went over to the offending door and closed it the way she normally would. She gave the knob a tug and groaned under her breath. The door didn't latch properly until she lifted up on the knob and heard a telltale click.
"Oh, Maple." Tessa sighed. "Honey, you can't be in here."
The goat stepped forward, caught her front hoof in the rug's fringe, and stumbled. She knocked over a kitchen chair with a clatter that sent Hamlet rocketing off the living room couch with a squeal of porcine alarm. The pig barreled into the kitchen, which startled Maple, who bolted sideways into the baker’s shelf and sent Fern's entire collection of canned goods onto the floor with a thunderous crash of breaking glass.
That must’ve woken Makayla, for she pounded downstairs and careened into the kitchen in her pajamas.
“Stop!” Tessa called urgently. “There’s broken glass on the floor and you’re barefoot!”
Makayla skidded to a halt and stared at the chaos. "Why’s Maple in the kitchen?"
"I assume she’s looking for her guide dog," she said past her overwhelming urge to run back to bed and hide under the covers.
"Cool.”
She shot Makayla a not now look.
“Umm, I’ll go get Captain and bring him down for Maple.”
“And put on some shoes, please,” she managed to say relatively calmly.
It took her two hours to clean the kitchen floor, herd Maple and Captain back outside, take care of the other animals, and discover the north fence had a broken section of fencing with a gap a goat could squeeze through.
It took her another full hour to patch for the fence using baling wire, pliers, and a YouTube tutorial by a cheerful man in Idaho who made fence repair look effortless. It was not.
Her hands were sore and blistered by the time she finished securing fencing to the posts and stretching it tight once more. She didn't have the nifty wire stretcher the guy in the video used and had to do it with her bare hands. She said a brief prayer over her patch, exhorting it to hold up for the next 361 days.
The horses, donkey, Maple and Captain, and an assortment of chickens trailed along behind her as she trudged toward the barn. The cute pair of Wellingtons she'd ordered online had arrived yesterday, at any rate, and the rubber boots that came up to mid-calf handled the springtime mud like champs.
Until she stepped in a puddle that turned out to be mostly mud and deep enough for her to sink to her ankles in it. She took her next step, heard a sucking sound, felt a squish under her foot, and wet cold abruptly soaked her sock. She looked down and saw only sock top where her leg protruded from the puddle
.She looked over her shoulder in dismay and spied the top of her hot pink rubber boot with little yellow rubber duckies all over it sticking up out of the puddle