Hindel Kidz 6: Joy's Adventure
Hindel Kidz 6
Joy’s Adventure
It had been a very cold day. The temperature dropped. Cold settled on the world. The fields were bare and frozen. The goats stayed in the building all the time now except on sunny mornings when they went out and stood in the yard breathing in the cold clean air. Jack put light bulbs under the goats’ water to keep it from freezing and put up paneling to block the cold winter wind.
Sven and Grace had been up to see Joy like normal. Before they left, Grace wanted to go out and see Joy one more time. They had had her for almost 48 hours. When they got ready to leave, Grace locked the door to the pen and Joy was eating hay. It was around 6:00pm.
Later Jack had looked out the window, but had a hard time seeing her. He thought it was because of the door and the heat lamp they had out there. He went out to check on her and saw she wasn’t in the pen. He jumped on the four-wheeler and took off through the field behind the house, hoping to catch her. He and Sven had searched for an hour before Grace knew about it.
It was around 9:00pm that night when Sven came very quickly through the front door.
“Joy’s gone,” he said.
“What?!”
Grace had never gotten dressed so fast in her life. She jumped up and pulled on her winter overalls and shoes. Sven grabbed his spotlight and they headed back up to Jack’s. They drove through the trailer court and the cornfields, shining the spotlight and calling Joy’s name.
When they arrived at Jack’s, Grace went right out to the pen. She was afraid she had not latched the door properly. The funny thing was the door was still locked. The front wall of the pen was four feet high and there was no way Joy could have crawled through one of the openings. Grace was getting blamed for letting her out.
“You were the last one to see her. Joy must have walked out behind you without you knowing,” Sven said.
Grace searched around the buildings while Sven and Jack went back out on the four wheelers. Unfortunately, they did not know how long Joy had been gone. Another strange thing was they didn’t hear her crying. Usually when they would leave her, she would cry for a few seconds.
It was ten degrees above zero that night and snow was starting to fall. It covered the house, the buildings and fields. By 11:00pm, Jack said Joy had probably laid down for the night. It was dark and there wasn’t much else they could do until it was light.
Sven and Grace were back up at Jack’s at 7:00am the next morning. They searched the fields again while Grace searched around all the buildings in peoples’ backyards and down by the elementary school. Still no Joy.
“Maybe someone stole her,” Sven said.
“But no one knew we had gotten her except Jack and Charlotte,” Grace pointed out. Charlotte was Jack’s wife, Sven’s stepmother.
Three hours later, Jack, Sven and Grace had come to the conclusion Joy was indeed gone. The only thing they could do was go home and make up a ‘Missing’ flier, which they planned to post in the grocery store and the post office. Sven and Grace had only gotten as far as typing the word ‘missing’ and the last time Joy was seen when there was a knock on their front door. It was Jack.
“Go to the meat house and get your goat.”
The meat house does custom butchering and meat packaging for the local farmers. The meat house was at the south end of town and Jack’s house was at the north end. Joy had made it from one end of town to the other in seventeen hours. They still don’t know how she managed to cross state route 16 and the railroad tracks without getting hit.
The people who lived across from the meat house heard Joy crying and saw her crossing their backyard. They caught her, thought she was cute and took her to the meat house thinking she had gotten loose from there. Since she had her collar on, the people who worked at the meat house assumed she was someone’s pet. They knew Jack owned goats. It just so happened it was butchering day at the meat house as well. They put a hair net on Joy and let her run around until the supervisor got fed up and tied her to a table in the back room. They were butchering cattle that day and had six deer lying around five feet from where Joy was tied up. Sven went in and found her underneath the table shaking like a leaf.
“I saw the other side of life,” Joy thought.
After that Sven and Grace decided to put her over in the big pen, which had an eight -foot high fence. They still have no idea how she got out unless she jumped.
“We should call her Houdini and get her some nametags like they have for dogs,” Grace said.
Needless to say, Joy has never left the backyard again. Not too many animals go to the meat house and come out alive. Everyone found out about Joy after that. Later on, Jack found out one of the girls who worked at Subway, had seen Joy and knew Bree had goats. How often do you see a little goat walking through downtown Wakatomika? Why didn’t that girl call? It would have saved them a lot of trouble and worry.
Joy was the smallest goat up there even though she is over a year old now. Goats are supposed to be full grown by the time they are a year old. Sven measured Joy and she was only the size of a six month old. Jack even thinks Joy is small for her age. Since Joy was a triplet, Grace often wondered how big her sisters were. Maybe they were small also.
“I wasn’t getting enough food down at Stoneybrook. It must have stunted my growth,” Joy thought.
