The Chicken Chase

Chapter 1: The Chicken Chase.

Lana’s mouth turned into the shape of a puzzled letter ‘O’ and her eyes centered on the ceiling as she tried to make a decision. After some time, she nodded agreeably and started to unload things that had not been mentioned by her father. Nicholas sighed with relief, happy that the peaceful matter of shopping for pets had not turned into a spoiled day for both of them.

Free from any worries, Lana pushed the shopping cart to the car while she balanced with one leg on the edge of its metal frame and kicked the ground with the other.  She was very excited by the thought of showing everything she had bought to her mother.

Tac and Tod did not realize that they were different, being a cat and a dog, Instead, they simply thought they were brothers, despite their differences in size, color and the matter of one barking and the other one meowing. They understood each other perfectly and worked as a team when they played forbidden games.

Their favorite game was called ‘chicken chase.’ At first, Tac would quietly sneak into the chicken-coop where the hen would be sitting peacefully on her nest and scare her out. Then Tod would chase the hen along a wooden fence which separated the yard from the front lawn. The frightened bird would run in an effort to escape back into her coop or would make an attempt to sneak through the gate into the garden to seek the protection of her husband, the rooster. Except that Tac would stop her and send her back to Tod. The chase would continue until the hen realized that the only way for her to get rid of these two was to fly over the fence. A chicken after all is a bird. With frenzied squawking, the hen would finally manage to fly her heavy body over the fence and run into the arms of her family, continuously cursing the cat and the dog in her own bird language.

With looks of disappointment, Tac and Tod would follow the hen until she had reached her destination and then both of them would run back to dig in the garden.

Lana would lift and carry them to the washroom to clean their dirty paws. Neither troublemaker argued over this procedure and only Tac, who did not like water, made the low cry of a cat approaching the end of his life.