Sheep

So FarmWife told me about sheep: fuzzy critters that grow cloudlike fibers of joy and goodness out of their skin. We even got a great big sack of said fibers in the mail from some kind sheep from Wyoming—it was swell! All was good. (FarmWife made a cute little experimental dog out of it, by the way, and wants to make some mules as well.)

Sheep=givers of gifts=growers of bountiful fleece, right? They must be cute, and tender, and clean, and gentle . . .

Well, with that association in mind, you can imagine that I was ill prepared for the angry-looking MegaGoat that I encountered at a friends' house yesterday. We rode up, innocently enough, to let the Chicken People's dogs out to pee. They had an astonishing, awful creature in their pasture—a creature about which FarmWife UTTERLY failed to warn me. I'm thinking that it looks like a goat, but angrier—it baas like a goat, but deeper. It's dressed like a goat, but with suspicious, bulky packages strapped to its torso. Not to be insensitive, but if it is a goat it is probably a Suicide Bomber Goat. Not the kind you want to hang around with.

Now here you see me assessing the Suicide Bomber Goat. This was before FarmWife told me it was a sheep, and even after she told me it was a sheep it took my traumatized, shaken-up brain a minute to associate the word with my gentle friends from Wyoming.

Please note the focus and determination with which I continued my prolonged assessment of the Suicide Bomber Goat—erm, sheep. If you have read my important treatise on the F.E.A.R.R. system for preservation of life and limb (look it up if you haven't) then you'll understand the importance of taking one's time with this business. My assessment went on for, we shall say, about eight minutes.

Next, you see the exhaustion into which I fell after the immediate threat of Death and Dismemberment had passed. Once I decided to go ahead and give the all clear, I cocked a hind leg and had a good long rest next to those sheep. FarmWife let the dogs pee. All was well.

Ears to you,
FenBar