Escape from Silver Street Farm

  Crash!

  Scrunch!

  Bash!

  Kenelottle Mossworthy Merridale of Morrayside, Kenny for short, was not a happy ram. In fact, he’d been in a bad mood ever since he’d arrived at Silver Street Farm earlier in the day. Now the sheep was head-butting the door of his stall. In spite of the roar of the winter gale, the sound traveled all the way to the signal-box-turned-chicken-house, where Meera, Karl, and Gemma — the three friends who had founded the city farm — were shoveling chicken poop. Meera, who was strong and round, and Gemma, who was a bendy beanpole of a person, did the shoveling, while Karl, who was small and skinny, held a big sack open to catch the mixture of straw and poop. It was hard work — not to mention a bit smelly — and the children were glad to stop for a minute to listen to Kenny’s temper tantrum.

  “Now I know what a head banger really is!” said Meera.

  “Won’t he hurt himself?” asked Karl.

  “No,” said Gemma, the sheep expert among them. “Their heads are like crash helmets. He’ll settle down when he meets his wives later today.”

  Kenelottle Mossworthy Merridale of Morrayside’s “wives” were Bobo and Bitzi, the Silver Street sheep. They had been sold to Karl’s auntie Nat as poodle puppies when they were lambs and had turned out to be pedigree Shetland sheep, who in turn deserved a pedigree Shetland sheep husband: Kenny.

  Meera plonked another dollop of poop-soaked straw into the sack. “Come on, guys,” she said. “We’d better get this finished. There’s a lot to do before tomorrow.”

  Meera was right. The next day was Christmas Eve, and Silver Street had to be ready for its grand opening. For the first time, the citizens of Lonchester would be able to visit their very own city farm. There were sheds to paint and repair and paths to clear, as well as all the day-to-day work like goat milking, sheep feeding, egg collecting, and poop clearing. But the children weren’t daunted. They loved every minute of it (even the poop clearing). Silver Street Farm was their dream come true.

  “Sometimes,” said Gemma, heaving another smelly shovelful, “I have to pinch myself so I know I’m not dreaming.”

  “I know just what you mean,” said Meera. “We spent so long imagining a farm like this, and now it’s real.”

  “And when you think how it all started,” Karl said with a laugh.

  “Poodles that were sheep,” said Meera.

  “Rotten eggs that hatched into ducklings,” said Gemma.

  “The nicest policeman in the world,” said Karl.

  “And Flora!” they all said together.

  Of all the lucky and amazing things that had helped them make their dreams of a farm in the city come true, the most lucky and amazing was Flora MacDonald. Flora, a young farmer from Scotland, had arrived out of the blue and offered to run Silver Street Farm. Flora’s experience and hard work had turned a handful of animals and a ruined train station into a farm. She was a bit bossy sometimes, but she never forgot that Silver Street Farm was the children’s idea — their dream.

  “We’ve only got till tomorrow to get her a Christmas present,” said Karl.

  “Yeah,” said Gemma. “But what? I can’t see her going for scented soap and bubble bath!”

  Meera smiled a knowing smile at her two friends.

  “I’ve got an idea for Flora’s present already,” she said. “And it’s a very, very good one. All we need to do is —”

  But Meera didn’t get the chance to say more, because just then Flora herself bounded up the wooden stairs to the chicken house, her curly hair blowing in the wind and her blue eyes blazing brightly.

  “Action stations, you three!” she called in her broad Scottish accent. “Bitzi and Bobo are missing, and the turkeys have disappeared, too!”

  Silver Street turkeys had nothing to fear at Christmas. Their purpose in life was to show Silver Street visitors what live turkeys looked like, not to provide humans with yummy Christmas dinners. But, in spite of being some of the luckiest turkeys in the world, the Silver Street turkeys were nervous and flighty creatures. They paced up and down by the fence of their enclosure, as if looking for a way out. They gobbled in alarm every time anyone — the children, Flora, or either of the two dogs (Buster, the Silver Street guard dog, and Flinty, Flora’s chicken-herding sheepdog) — passed their pen and ran about with their wattles wiggling like strings of red licorice.

  The turkeys’ nervousness was starting to rub off on Bobo and Bitzi, the Silver Street sheep, in the next-door enclosure. Or rather, it was rubbing off on Bobo. (Nothing much at all rubbed off on Bitzi, who only really noticed two things: food and what Bobo was doing.)

  Every time the turkeys gobbled or paced anxiously, Bobo headed for the far end of her pen. And because Bobo did, so did Bitzi. Pretty soon, they’d grazed almost all the grass and stray brambles that had covered the fence at that end. Which was how, on the day the children were merrily pitchforking chicken poop, Bobo and Bitzi nibbled through the last few bramble leaves covering the corner of their pen and found . . . nothing at all. No wire, no fence posts, just a gap.

  Bobo stood and stared at the gap. It was scary and tempting at the same time. She turned her back and walked away, but the hole seemed to call to her. She soon found herself back beside it, staring through to the other side.

  It was at that very moment that a large rat crossed the turkey pen, just as Buster was walking past on his way to look for cookie crumbs in Flora’s van. Buster was big and fierce looking, but, in spite of his appearance and his previous job as a guard dog, he was a big softie. Except, that was, when it came to rats. Especially rats that swaggered as if they owned the place.

  Grrrrrr! Buster flung himself at the fence, barking as loudly as he could. Rats, of course have a deep understanding of fences and know exactly when they are on the safe side of them. So the rat took no notice of Buster’s woofs and snarls. The turkeys, however, already nervous for mysterious reasons of their own, had hysterics.

  The nasty noise and commotion was all Bobo needed to overcome her fear of the unknown. She pushed her nose through the gap in the fence and pulled her fat, woolly bottom after it. Bitzi followed along dreamily with a bit of leaf sticking out of her mouth. They tip-tapped over the little metal footbridge to the other side of the canal and disappeared through a flurry of old newspapers and plastic grocery bags, which were suddenly caught up in a gust of wind like confetti. Behind them, the barking and gobbling suddenly stopped. With a lot of panicky flapping and another big gust of wind, the turkeys made it up, up, up and over the fence at the bottom of their pen, then immediately down, down, down on the other side and straight into the canal. The rat, no doubt pleased with the chaos it had caused, went back down its hole, and Buster trotted off, suddenly remembering the importance of cookie crumbs.

  It was easy to see how the sheep had gotten out — Karl and Flora found the gap in the fence at once. But when they searched along the canal bank, there was no sign of them.

  “Could Flinty sniff them out?” Karl asked. “I mean, she is a sheepdog.”

  “She’s supposed to be a sheepdog,” Flora explained patiently, “but she’s terrified of sheep. She’s probably delighted that they’re gone.”

  Hearing her name mentioned, Flinty wagged her tail and sniffed at the gap approvingly, as if to say “Nasty sheep, good riddance!”

  “They could be miles away by now.” Flora sighed and shook her head. “If they get onto a road, I dread to think what might happen.”

  Karl had never seen Flora so worried. He couldn’t think what to say. Then he had an idea. “Could Kenny sniff them out?”

  “That,” said Flora, “is the craziest idea I’ve heard in a long while. . . . And it might just work. Although,
he is a wee bit on the feisty side. . . .”

  Kenny glared at Karl and Flora from the far end of his stall. He stamped his hooves and lowered his head, ready to charge with his beautiful curving horns. Karl decided that the only way the ram could look more impressive and scary was if he actually had fire coming out of his nostrils.

  “The good thing about horns,” said Flora quietly, “is that that they make good handles.” Then she shook a bucket, and the sheep-food pellets rattled in the bottom.

  Kenny raised his head and sniffed the air. He stopped stamping and walked daintily across the stall to bury his big head in the bucket and munch noisily.

  “That’s a good boy,” said Flora. “OK, Karl. Now!” Gently but very firmly, they each took hold of one of Kenny’s horns. The ram struggled furiously, making Karl’s arm muscles scream for mercy. Then, after a few seconds, Kenny stood still and let Flora slip the halter over his head and secure it around his nose.

  “There you go!” Flora said. “He’s been in so many farm shows, he knows the routine of being on a halter and led about. He’ll give us no more trouble now.”

  Kenny seemed pleased to be outside. He sniffed the wind and immediately set off down the ramp that led from the station platform to the sheep pen on the old train tracks. Karl and Flora didn’t even have to guide the ram to the gap in the fence — he went straight to it, sniffed it carefully, then pushed through. He set off down the towpath and over the footbridge so fast that Karl and Flora had trouble keeping up.

  “We’ll find them in no time!” said Karl.

  “I just hope they’re not in any trouble,” said Flora grimly. “We could do without any bad publicity before the grand opening.”

  There was no sign of the turkeys anywhere, just a little whirlpool of feathers dancing in the wind. Meera and Gemma looked at each other, mystified.

  “How can they have just disappeared?” said Meera. “They were here fifteen minutes ago.”

  “There must be some clue we’re missing,” said Gemma. “We’ve got to be like detectives. Come on, let’s check the fences again.”

  The two girls split up and walked around the edge of the turkey pen, looking carefully at every bit of the fence.

  Suddenly Gemma called out, “Hey, look at this!”

  Where the pen bordered on a scrubby wasteland of grasses and brambles, a neat little door had been cut in the tall wire fence at ground level. It had been rejoined so cleverly that you had to look hard to see it. It would take just two or three twists of the wire closing the little door to open up a gap big enough to let a small child in — or ten turkeys out.

  “Maybe someone came through and stole them,” said Meera.

  Gemma shook her head. “They’d have to catch them first, and you know how flighty our turkeys are,” she said. “Flora told me that she heard them making a noise, and when she came out of the office a minute later, they were gone. There just wasn’t time to catch ten turkeys and get them through this hole.”

  “Maybe it was the work of Gobble O Seven, international turkey thief,” Meera joked, but they both knew it wasn’t really funny. A grand opening with missing livestock was no laughing matter. Their only option seemed to be to go through the fence to see if there were more clues.

  The gateway in the fence was smaller than it looked. Meera’s bottom got stuck, and she ripped the seat of her jeans.

  “Huh!” she muttered grumpily. “Well, at least we know we’re looking for small, skinny turkey thieves!”

  On the other side of the fence, there was an old oil drum, and behind that was a tunnel through a tangle of plants. It was a tight squeeze, and Meera kept getting hooked up in brambles as she crawled along behind Gemma on her hands and knees, through a series of cold muddy puddles. The tunnel ran for more than a hundred yards and came out in a graveyard of old train equipment, out of sight from the farm.

  “That’s clever!” said Gemma. “Whoever made this tunnel knew they could crawl all the way up to the fence without being seen and make a quick getaway!” Gemma pointed to the wall at the end of the train cemetery. “The main road into town is on the other side of that wall.”

  “But how would you get ten turkeys through the fence, along the tunnel, and over the wall in less than half a minute?” said Meera, pulling herself free from a particularly thorny bramble. “Ten turkeys are really heavy, and there’d be loads of feathers everywhere.”

  Gemma shook her head. “Maybe,” she said, chewing one of her braids thoughtfully, “this is a red herring.”

  “A what?” said Meera, pretty convinced that fish had nothing to do with missing turkeys.

  “A red herring means a clue that isn’t really a clue,” Gemma replied. “You know, something that leads the detective off the real trail.”

  “So the hole in the fence and the tunnel might not have anything to do with how the turkeys disappeared this morning?” said Meera. “But if that’s true, then I’ve just ripped my jeans for nothing!”

  Gemma nodded. “I think,” she said, “we need to go back to Silver Street Farm and allow chocolate cookies to fuel further investigations.”

  “That, Detective,” Meera said, “is the smartest thing you’ve said all morning.”

  Bobo sniffed the road. It smelled nasty: cold and oily and dead. There wasn’t a scrap of anything to eat anywhere. None of the people were doing anything useful, like bringing them a nice bucket of food or half a bale of sweet hay. None of the humans they knew were there, just endless streams of strangers, who didn’t seem to notice the two sheep at all.

  Bobo tip-tapped closer to a huge doorway. A blast of warmth like summer wafted toward her, and Bobo moved closer, sniffing at the balmy curtain of air. There was a faint smell — a smell of something growing, something edible. Bobo trotted through the bright doorway with Bitzi close behind her.

  It was certainly a very odd place. Bobo had never seen so many humans all together. They pushed wire carts like the ones she’d seen her humans pulling out of the canal. The floor was very hard and slippery, but it smelled a bit nicer than the road. The good thing was that there were buckets and boxes of nice edible things all around. They weren’t arranged at the most convenient height for a sheep, which was irritating, not to mention inconsiderate, but Bobo had always been good on her hind legs.

  Just above her nose was a bucket, very like her own feed bucket, stuffed full of leaves and flowers. Of course, being a sheep, she couldn’t see the colors of the flowers, but she could smell their juicy smell. With a little jump, she lifted herself onto her hind legs and rested her dainty forelegs against the slippery bucket. It was rather uncomfortable, so she was glad when, as she tugged at the flowers with her mouth, the bucket of flowers, in fact all the buckets of flowers, began to fall. Deftly Bobo stepped out of the way and then stepped back to dig in to a feast so delicious that she didn’t even notice the humans making a fuss all around her.

  Bitzi had followed Bobo, as usual without much thought, but she certainly woke up when she saw and smelled all the yummy stuff in buckets. In fact, she was so overcome by the sight and smell of so much exotic food that, as the flower stand keeled over, she didn’t take the necessary avoiding action, and a large bucket plopped right over her head. Bitzi panicked. Who had turned off the lights so suddenly? Where had all that nice food gone? She trotted in circles, then realized that if she looked down, she could see her own familiar feet and, just a little farther on, the reassuring hooves of her leader.

  At that moment, Bobo glanced over her shoulders and saw a monster with a huge square head and a sheep’s body coming toward her. It was horrible. A beast with no eyes, clearly determined to eat her. She snatched one last flower stalk and fled over the slippery floor, scattering the screaming humans.

  Kenny rounded the corner and went straight for the supermarket entrance, pulling Karl after him. The ram was really rather irritated now. Never, in all his long experience of ewes, had he encountered any as flighty as these two. He had followed their (admittedly
very nice) smell for what seemed like hours, through all manner of horrible places completely unsuitable for any sort of sheep. And now they’d led him here, to this chaos, with humans running around and the floor covered in water and crushed plants.

  There they were — those two naughty ewes — just up ahead, through the forest of human legs and supermarket carts. One of the foolish creatures had a bucket on her head. Dear me! It was up to him to sort this all out, right now! With a practiced and determined tug, Kenny jerked the halter leash free from Karl’s hand, put his head down, and charged straight toward the two ewes, who were fast disappearing behind the breakfast cereals.

  By the time they’d gotten back to the Silver Street office, Meera and Gemma were covered in scratches from the bramble tunnel and freezing cold from crawling through muddy puddles. It had taken several mugs of tea and a large number of chocolate cookies to warm them up, but they were no nearer to solving the mystery of the disappearing turkeys. Just as they were wondering if another package of cookies might help, the phone rang.

  “This is Silver Street Farm. Can I help you?” said Meera.

  “Ah!” said a warm and booming voice down the phone line. “That’s young Meera, isn’t it?”

  Meera grinned. It was Sergeant Short of the Lonchester Police Department. He’d been a great supporter of Silver Street Farm right from the start.

  “Hello, Sergeant,” said Meera. “I was just thinking of calling you. We think someone’s stolen our turkeys!”

  “Ah!” said the sergeant. “Well, in that case, you need to bicycle down to the Marston Park overflow dam, because I think your turkeys are about to go over it, riding on a bouncy castle.”

  “What?”

  “There isn’t time to explain,” said Sergeant Short, “and I’m not really sure that I could anyway. Officer Worthing will meet you there.”

  Meera put the phone down. “Get your bike, Gemma,” she said. “I’ll tell you what we’re doing on the way. Just follow me.”