Once Upon a Time, there lived three
little pigs. Well, there we go already, stretching the
truth. Actually, they weighed more than five hundred pounds each
by the end of the story, but they were little once, and that’s
when they decided to call themselves the “Three Little Pigs.” It
was sort of a club, you see, and they used to build little forts
out of sticks and things. The Three Little Pigs pledged
“Perpetual Mutual Fealty and Fidelity,” which was Hugo’s fancy
way of saying they promised to always stick together. Hugo, the
oldest, read a lot and liked big words. Waldo was kind of sweet,
but gullible, and Bruno, the youngest—well, Bruno was always
trying to distract the other pigs so he could steal their food.
Before long, they started to outgrow their forts and
stopped hanging around together, in favor a eating a lot and
lying in their manure, which is kind of gross, but they were
pigs after all. Anyway, when they were a year old and weighed
four hundred pounds each, a terrible thing happened: A truck
backed up to their yard with jelly donuts in the back (their
favorite kind), and they, of course, clambered up the ramp,
right inside. I mean, wouldn’t you?
“Look at the sky!” exclaimed Bruno. “Is that a
fledgling Zarf?” Hugo looked because it was something he’d never
heard of, and Waldo looked because Hugo did. While Bruno snarfed
up all the donuts and the other pigs squinted at the sky,
someone shut the tailgate.
Of course, most people don’t know
this background; they just know bout the house of straw, the
“big bad wolf” and all that. But over the years, folks have been
clamoring to know how the three pigs came to be on their own,
like if they were so little, where were their parents? And how
did they learn to build those houses? These questions nagged at
the public mind, threatening to spoil the story, until finally
there was that Children’s Librarian strike in Walla Walla,
Washington last year. I’m sure you heard about that, where the
librarians dressed up as mimes at major intersections and so
irritated everyone in the city that a commission was… Oh, sorry,
we’re way off track. Let’s get back to the story.
Well, when farm animals get taken
away in a truck, especially one that arrives without
explanation, and most especially one with jelly donuts on board,
it’s not a good sign. It means—Well, I hate to tell you, but it
means they’re going to get made into meat. Okay, so technically
they’re already meat, mostly, same as you and me. But you know
what I mean, right? So they’re in the back of this truck, and
they’d heard these ugly rumors whispered around the farm after
dark, you know, but they never thought it would happen to them,
and they got to talking. After they finished licking the jelly
off the floor, that is.
“Say, Hugo, you don’t think we’re going to the uh, you
know, the meat place?” asked Waldo.
“Don’t be stupid,” Bruno interrupted. “There’s no such
thing. It’s like the tooth fairy and animal rights groups.”
“There’s no tooth fairy?” asked Waldo,
eyes wide.
“Shut up,” said Bruno, who wasn’t very nice when he was
frightened. “We’re not going to the meat-packing plant. We’ve
uh, been accidentally locked inside a donut truck. We’re
probably going back to the bakery now.”
Waldo looked to Hugo, who rolled his eyes.
“Look,” said Hugo. “We have to stick together to
survive. Remember our pledge of Perpetual Mutual Fealty and—?”
“Stop with the long words and get to the point
already,” snapped Bruno. “Like my mother used to say: ‘Never use
a big word when a diminutive one will do.’”
“Bruno, you just—” but Hugo nudged him.
Hugo cleared his throat. “My point is, we need to work
together to get out of here. Look, the top is open. If we stand
on one another, one of us can get out and, um, well, get out.
And hopefully run for help.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bruno snorted. But they were
going through downtown Podunk just then and, as the truck turned
a corner, the smell of hot dogs cooking at a hot dog stand
wafted into the truck. The Three Little Pigs looked at each
other, horrified. “Here, one of you guys get on my back,” Bruno
said quickly.
And so it was, that through ingenuity
and minor acrobatics that Waldo, the smallest (he weighed
only three hundred and ninety-nine pounds), was able to get to
the top. But it was a long way down, and he hadn’t thought about
the fact that he was afraid of heights. So he stood on his hind
legs on the roof of the truck cab, and thought about what to do.
Thinking, as you probably know, attracts hornets, which explains
why so few people get stung. But animals get stung all the time,
and right then a hornet flew up and stung Waldo on the throat as
he stood thinking.
“Ow!” And, without thinking (which protected him from
future stings), Waldo brought his front hooves up to his throat.
Now, bringing one’s front hooves, or hands, if you have them, to
one’s throat is the universal sign for choking. Your mother no
doubt told you to never, EVER, bring your front hooves or hands
to your throat in public, unless you are actually choking. Now,
as luck would have it, there was a conference of paramedics that
day, and they were all hanging around in front of the donut shop
on coffee break, eating jelly donuts, their favorite kind, when
the truck stopped for a light.
“Hey!” someone yelled, pointing his jelly-covered
finger toward the truck. “That pig is choking!” (It was this
picture, the concerned paramedic in the foreground pointing to
the disconcerted pig in the background that appeared in the
Podunk Post-Patriot, the next morning.)
Instantly, the truck was surrounded
by sticky-fingered paramedics, and the panicked driver was
forced to stay put while they swarmed up the sides. There was
some confusion as to which pig was choking, so all three were
removed to the sidewalk, where the paramedics performed the
Heimlich maneuver (so called because ‘Heimlich’ is the sound
most people make when they start to choke), on them to get them
unchoked.
While the pigs were getting Heimliched, someone brought
out a fresh tray of jelly donuts and, in the ensuing paramedic
melee (the worst kind), the pigs slipped away. Here, the record
becomes a bit sketchy, but it seems an itinerant shoe-lace
retipper named Benjamin Better picked them up hitchhiking and
dropped them off at the Calm Creatures Collective, where their
famous brick house now stands.
It was there that the story we’re familiar with began
to unfold, although many inaccuracies have been corrected, as
you will see.
The pigs got a warm welcome at the
Collective, and were given an old Folkswagen van to live
in, seeds with which to plant a garden (which Bruno promptly
ate), and best of all, plenty of food. Life was good there,
except when the pigs rolled over in the night, the van tipped
over. So they decided to build a house together.
“A straw house,” said Bruno, for the eleventy-seventh
time. “That’s the easiest. I hear that in
town you can go in the dumpster behind McMilkshake’s and get all
the straws you want.” He was thinking of all the leftover food
that might also be in the dumpster.
“Is that the right kind of straw? I thought real straw
was grain stalks,” Waldo said.
“Silence!” snarled Bruno.
Hugo, who had been reading War and Pigs, glanced up.
“Huh?” he said.
“Permanent Mutual Fealty and Fiddle-dee-dee!”
proclaimed Bruno, raising a hoof. Even though he didn’t know
what the occasion was, Hugo brightened at Bruno’s attempt to
say, “Let’s always stick together,” and also raised a hoof.
Waldo, who hated to be left out, raised a hoof as well, and so
they were all happy for a few minutes, until Bruno trooped them
over to McMilkshake’s.
“Bruno,” Hugo said, as he loaded drippy straws into a
backpack. “I don’t think this is going to work.”
“Perpetual Motion Filter and Fidelity!” said Bruno,
with such conviction and a welling of tears in his eyes, that
Hugo went along with the plan.
In a few days, with some help from
the community (particularly the songbirds), The Three Little
Pigs had a house of straw, or straws to be exact. It swayed
gently in the breeze and smelled pleasantly like a sour
milkshake. They moved right in.
So the next day, a wolf came to the door. It wasn’t
what you think, not at all. This was a retired wolf, very old
and grizzled, with bad teeth. She pulled a painted wagon that
read “R.L. Huffenpuff Blown House Down: Simply the Finest
Insulation Anywhere, Guaranteed.” She was selling, you see,
feathers, the small ones called down, for insulation. All sales
went to buy feed for the old animals at the Calm Creatures
Collective. The wolf hobbled up to the door and rapped with her
cane. Waldo peeked out.
“It’s a wolf!” he cried. Bruno dove under his bed.
“Well, ask what it wants,” Hugo said.
“What do you want?” asked Waldo.
The wolf cleared her throat. “Open up, R.L. Huffenpuff
Blown House Down,” she said proudly, if somewhat indistinctly.
“R.L. Huffenpuff Blown House Down.”
“Nnnot by the hhair on my chchinny-chin-chin!” said
Bruno, shivering from under the bed.
“Maybe even less,” said Waldo. He was thinking of
Bruno’s long beard.
“Wait, what did she say? I’m going to let her in,” Hugo
said. But Bruno reached out and kicked him in the shins (which
wasn’t very nice, of course, but he did). While Hugo danced
around in pain, the wolf gave up and went away.
Waldo and Hugo made pancakes for
supper, but Bruno stayed under the bed, saying over and over,
“Our house is gonna get blown down, I just know it.”
As luck would have it (that
seemed to happen a lot in this story), there was a terrible
windstorm that night. And being made of straws, naturally their
house blew down.
“I hate wolves, I hate ‘em, they’re bad,” said Bruno,
as he paced the yard while Waldo and Hugo picked up the straws.
“Can a wolf really blow a house down?” Waldo asked. But
Bruno shot him a mean look and he didn’t ask again.
Hugo, who wasn’t afraid of mean looks, said, “I think
it was a storm.” But he was afraid of shin kicks and became
quiet after Bruno tried to kick him again. As you know, they
made their next house (with lots of help from the beavers) of
sticks, a compromise between bricks, which Hugo favored, and
straws, which Bruno still wanted.
Soon after the wolf returned, and the same thing
happened: Bruno shouted from under the bed while Hugo tried to
hear what she was saying.
“Open up, R.L. Huffenpuff Blown House Down,” said the
wolf.
“Nnnot by the hhhair on my chinny-chin-chin,” Bruno
stammered.
Their house of sticks lasted longer
than the house of straws, but every night Bruno said from under
his bed (where he now slept), “Our house is gonna get blown
down, I just know it.” As anyone who’s ever lived in a stick
house knows, they aren’t very sturdy either. And one night, a
really big storm came and the stick house got blown down.
“It’s that wolf again!” snarled Bruno in the morning.
“We need a security fence!”
“She must have huge lungs,” mused Waldo.
“It think it was another storm,” said Hugo, staying
well away from Bruno.
After much squabbling, they all
agreed to build a brick house, although Bruno developed a
terrible hangnail during the weeks of building and wasn’t able
to help. Not surprisingly, the wolf showed up soon after the
house was done.
“Open up, R.L. Huffenpuff Blown House Down,” she said
in a tired voice. She was beginning to think the pigs were not
going to buy insulation. But to her surprise, Hugo, having
dodged Bruno’s kicks from under his bed, opened the door. The
rest happened very quickly.
The following day, contrary to
popular belief, the brick house got blown down: a team of ducks
and geese shook feathers into a hopper, and the wolf worked a
giant bellows. It huffed and puffed, sending feathers through a
hose into the walls and attic. The pigs’ house was warm in
winter and cool in summer, and they had the wolf over many time
for pancakes. Bruno, of course, stayed under the bed during her
visits.
And they lived happily, relatively speaking, ever
after.
About The Author
Paul Hetzler lives on an off-grid
homestead in the wilds of New York, with his two teenage
children and a host of coyotes and porcupines. Despite his busy
schedule—burning the toast on the woodstove, wrestling the
irrigation pump hose in the beaver pond, and generally
embarrassing his offspring—he manages to write nonfiction
articles on tree care and some children’s stories.
He has sold work to Highlights and
CharacterS magazines and recently finished a YA novel,
The Peace of Wild Things, about a mildly autistic teen with
severe PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), who attempts to
control his world by working infinitely hard on his farm job.
Ever pursuing lofty aspirations, Mr. Hetzler hopes one
day to not burn quite so much toast.
Copyright © Paul Hetzler