He lived happily ever after.
Whitey sat on his wooden stool with a single candle illuminating the small table near the window in the southwest corner of his home. Carefully set were his favorite wooden utensils, all neatly placed to the right of the handmade rectangular trough. On the left of the bowl was a hollowed-out rock that held his beverage of choice, sweet apple juice.
His special dishes were out as this was a special feast. After all, how often does one get to dine on a dish as delectable as slow-cooked wolf and turnip stew with brown butter sauce? How did Whitey, a curly-tailed American Yorkshire pig, capture and kill a muscular Great Plains wolf? Well…
Whitey had built a roaring blaze in his fireplace and placed over it a huge pot of water. When the unsuspecting wolf, who had been carefully sliding down the chimney into Whitey’s home, reached the bottom, he tumbled into the pot, smacking his huge head against the side and knocking himself out cold. Whitey then simply threw in some turnips and spices, placed the heavy lid on the pot and, six hours later, stew.
Whitey felt no remorse whatsoever for cooking the wolf. He was no friend. He had tried to act that way over the last several days until he got angry today and threatened him. Whitey was returning from the carnival in town when he saw the wolf approaching. He hid inside a butter churn he had purchased at the carnival and rolled down a hill inside of it. He narrowly missed running over the terrified wolf and continued rolling until he was steps from the front door of his brick home. The wolf saw him climb out of the churn and ran towards his house, howling and snapping his jaws in anger. Whitey got inside and managed to slam and bolt the door just as the wolf hit his front stairs.
Normally, a wolf wouldn’t be so angry about a simple case of a pig rolling inside a butter churn, but he was already agitated by Whitey from the two days prior when they had agreed to pick turnips from a nearby garden and apples from a nearby orchard. In each case Whitey, who was as crafty and wise as any pig in the land even though he was only three years old, had beaten the wolf to the best turnips and apples by leaving an hour earlier than they had agreed to meet. He easily got back to his home with the best turnips before the wolf arrived at 6:00am, the time they had arranged to meet and walk over to Mrs. Cranston’s turnip patch.
The apple orchard was a slightly different story, as it was further away than the turnip patch and required Whitey to scale a tree, something pigs aren’t known for their skill in doing. While he was up in the tree plucking the last of the plumpest apples, the wolf showed up looking for him. Thinking fast, the pig grabbed a worm-filled apple and heaved it to the north, away from the direction of his home. The wolf, yielding to his dog ancestry, chased after the apple while the pig scurried down the tree and scampered back to his home, laughing all the way.
Before Whitey’s turnip and apple deceptions, he had doubted the wolf’s motivations in developing a true friendship with him. The day before the turnip picking, the wolf had approached Whitey’s newly constructed brick home claiming he was a construction expert and saying he would be happy to test the structural integrity of the house. He insisted that Whitey “Open the door and let me in”. Whitey, though, knew wolves weren’t home builders and through the front door, he said in a loud, defiant voice, “No! Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!”
The wolf was offended by the refusal of his kind offer of a free inspection, and to prove his point he said he was going to “Huff and puff and blow your house in!” The wolf blew until he was blue in the face, but nothing happened. The bricks Whitey had used to build his home passed the test. This was the moment when the wolf shifted from home inspector to friendly neighbor, but Whitey wasn’t fooled.
A few days earlier, he might have believed the wolf actually had some knowledge of home building or a genuine interest in friendly relations, and that perhaps the huffing, the puffing and the blowing were his way of demonstrating whether the house was really well built. But the day before his first encounter with the wolf, he had gone to visit his brother Blackie to see his new house made of sticks. As he gotten within eyesight of the house, instead of a cute ranch home, he saw a huge pile of fallen timber. He ran the rest of the distance to Blackie’s home and frantically started digging through the sticks, throwing them this way and that, all the while yelling “Blackie! Where are you?”
His answer came a few minutes later when he found poor Blackie’s remains, his torso ripped apart by what Whitey assumed were the razor-sharp teeth of a wolf. If only Blackie had listened to him and built his house out of brick like he had planned to do. Instead, Blackie’s laziness had doomed him.
Terrified by what he had seen, Whitey ran full speed for his other brother’s house just over the small hill next to the lake. Brownie had been the first to finish his house, but not through his own hard work. He had slapped it up in a few hours using straw from a man they met on the road. All the way to Brownie’s house, he cursed Blackie and prayed for a different fate for Brownie.
As he reached the top of the small hill, he saw it. A haphazard pile of straw lay strewn across the land. Frantic again, he called out for his brother as he dug through the straw piles, but after 20 minutes of searching, he had found nothing. Maybe Brownie had escaped!
Whitey soon learned his hopes for safety for his last brother were for naught. About 30 feet from his former home, Whitey found what was left of his brother, a similarly half eaten pig showing what he believed were telltale signs of a wolf’s devastation.
Whitey wept and wept for his two brothers. Why couldn’t they have been like him, willing to work hard to build homes that could withstand wind, rain or wolf? Even further, why did they all leave the safety of their mother’s sty? They all could have eaten a little less and made the food the family had access to enough for all of them. Whitey thought of the fun they had together as piglets, when the troubles of enough food or safety from predators where never in their minds. He was alone now but, once upon a time there were three little pigs.
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