It all began one particularly sunny French morning, the kind of morning where croissants flake just right, and everything smells faintly of lavender, hay, and mild chaos.
David and Fiona, proud temporary guardians of a beautifully renovated barn in the countryside of Cazideroque, were sipping their coffee and admiring the peaceful scene. Except it wasn’t peaceful. Not at all.
Brian, the barn cat, was sprawled across the kitchen floor like a sock that had given up on life. His fur was ruffled, his whiskers askew, and he smelled like old cheese, eau-de-rodent, and questionable decisions. Clearly, Brian had been out all night. The chickens were whispering. Rodney the rooster was pacing. Something had happened.
“Looks like Brian went to a rave,” David said.
“Or a rodent orgy,” Fiona replied, delicately nudging him with a slipper.
Once Brian was rehydrated and muttering feline expletives under his breath, David and Fiona decided to do the rounds. That’s when they saw it.
The electric fence.
Flat on the ground.
Sparking faintly like it, too, had seen some things.
And the rams?
Gone.
Poof.
The rams, poofing off into the French wilderness.
At this point, questions were raised. Had the rams masterminded a clever escape while Brian distracted everyone with his late-night antics? Were they lured away by rogue baguette salesmen? Had they been recruited into an underground wool-smuggling ring operating out of the Pyrenees? Or were they, as Fiona suggested, halfway to Thailand to work in a shady nightclub near a butcher’s shop under the name “The Funky Flock”?
With Alison and Andrew both hours away, a rescue plan was hatched. Reinforcements were summoned. Derek arrived in a Peugeot 207, the kind of car that screams “I may not be a hero, but I’ve read the manual. With a look of determination and a very small map. He was either here to help or to start a jazz band, it was unclear.
The group fanned out like seasoned ram bounty hunters, which none of them were. Rodney provided emotional support from a distance, and the hens formed a sort of ineffective search committee that mostly stuck close to the food bowl.
Eventually, the rams were located on a neighbour’s land, casually munching away as if they hadn’t just sparked a full-blown livestock panic. They were rounded up and escorted home with all the grace of mildly intoxicated wedding guests.
Back at the barn, after much theorizing, the group came to a likely conclusion: a deer—probably French, and almost certainly smug and wearing a beret—had bounded through the field, taking out the electric fence like a four-legged wrecking ball. The rams, never ones to ignore an open door and greener grass, simply followed their instincts and wandered off like woolly philosophers in search of meaning.
Brian remained suspiciously silent throughout the entire debriefing, licking his paw and avoiding eye contact. He knows more than he’s letting on.
And so, the rams were home, the fence was repaired, and Brian returned to his usual position of moral ambiguity.
As they say in France: “Tout est bien qui finit avec un chat sur le canapé.”
(All’s well that ends with a cat on the couch.)
