The Pig's Tale

Once upon a time there was a fat triple-chinned pig named Jake who lived in a pigpen on Farmer Benny's farm. Jake lived happily in his small pen where each morning he awoke to find a mound of fresh corn in the corner of his pen. The kernels were quite delicious, and more than filling, but Jake spent all of three minutes ingesting his breakfast before there was no more food to be found inside the enclosure where he spent each day of his life.

After his morning meal, Jake napped in the sunshine when it was sunny, and he dozed in his straw-filled hog house when it rained. But with little else to do in such a small world of experience, Jake felt himself grow more and more slothful with each passing day.

One morning, after finishing his breakfast, Jake found that the gate to his enclosure was left unlatched, almost certainly by accident. With his snout, Jake pushed open the gate and seeing no sign of Farmer Benny or his dogs, scurried hurriedly to the cover of a patch of woods just a few paces from the farm.

Compared to Jake's 20-foot by 20-foot cage, the 400-acre woods seemed an eternally expansive universe. Jake spent hours and hours each day rooting through the soft detritus, slurping on beetle larvae, crunching roots, and chomping mushrooms growing from the soft ground.

At night Jake would nuzzle into a patch of tall grass or crispy leaves and snore lazily until dawn, when he would awake once again to feast upon the forest floor.

As weeks passed, Jake felt more energized. Losing much of the extra weight he had gained on Farmer Benny's farm, he had become leaner, more svelte. He could burst in sudden sprints for up to 100 yards without stopping, and he had lost his triple-chin.

Meandering from grove to grove along the river bottom that flowed through the woods, Jake chanced to enter into a clearing, which turned out to be the farm from which he had escaped. Having grown unaccustomed to the burden of captivity and feeling more sprightly and adventuresome than he had in earlier times, Jake followed his snout into the barn where he sensed the most delicious aroma of sweet corn. Indeed, Farmer Benny had harvested the first batch of "Peaches and Cream" corn cobs from the summer garden, which were lying in a pile on the barn floor while Farmer Benny had gone inside the house to fetch his paring knife and bowl. When he returned to the barn, imagine his surprise to find Jake, a hog that he had given up hope to retrieve, filling himself with corn.

Occupied with his meal, Jake paid no attention as Farmer Benny fetched a length of rope and tied it around the barrow's neck. Suddenly interrupted from his meal, Jake felt himself being led back into the pigpen he had escaped so many months ago.

The next morning, Jake awoke to a mound of fresh corn in the corner of his pigpen, which he promptly ate before napping for several hours. This routine continued for some number of days until Farmer Benny slaughtered him and placed in the freezer various pieces of him wrapped in wax butcher's paper. Farmer Benny's wife remarked that she could not remember tasting such a wonderful pork tenderloin, and Farmer Benny said he had to agree.