Little Sister and the Runaway Piglet
in which a small pig solves a big problem in a very small voice
It started with the little gate that always sticks. Big Brother had been meaning to fix it. Papa had been meaning to remind him.
But on the morning we are talking about, neither of those things had happened yet, and the gate, for reasons of its own, decided to swing open.
That is how Pickle the piglet got out.
Pickle was a guest piglet, just visiting from the farm down the road, and he was small enough to fit in a soup pot but quick enough to outrun a bicycle. The first to spot him was Little Sister Pig, who was, as usual, holding a handful of corn kernels and explaining current events to the chickens.
"PICKLE!" she shouted. "WAIT!"
Pickle did not wait.
He went left through the herb garden. He went right past the rain barrel. He cut a corner so fast that two butterflies fell off a sunflower in surprise.
Little Sister gave chase. Her boots flapped. Her pigtails bounced. The chickens followed because the chickens always follow.
"Pickle, Pickle, please!" she puffed. "I have CORN!"
She tried the apple tree. She tried the woodpile. She tried hollering. She tried whispering. (Whispering does not, it turns out, work on piglets.) Eventually Pickle dove under the porch, and Little Sister flopped down in the grass, very out of breath, with one boot half off and one chicken on her head.
She thought for a long quiet minute.
Then she did something unusual.
She lay down on her belly in the grass, very still, and started telling a story. About a brave little piglet who once visited a farm so big and so tall and so noisy that he just had to RUN, because everything was so much.
"And then," whispered Little Sister, "the piglet found a soft spot, and he sat very, very still. And he heard the wind do something nice. And he wasn't scared anymore."
There was a rustle.
Two wet pink ears poked out from under the porch.
Pickle came over, slowly, slowly, and tucked his nose under her chin.
"There you are," she said. "There you are."
Big Brother fixed the gate that afternoon. Papa fixed the latch. But everybody agreed it was Little Sister who had really done the fixing.