Abreast

The weasels lined up, five abreast, in a file five deep. Old Granny Badger cast her eyes over them from the long fuzzy spire of her snout. “Gentlemen,” she croaked, “the time has come for us to leave this wood and move up in the world.”

“Aye!” the weasels shouted as one, “Ma’am!”

“Hrmph,” said Old Granny Badger. “None of you thinking of turning tail now, eh? Got some eggs left in the pantry, wimmen-weasels waiting in the wings?”

“Nay!” the weasels shouted, “Ma’am!”

“Gentlemen, I put it to you that this wood has been ruined by those dreadful men across the interstate, the long legged pink men who come forth to rut under our pines and in our groves with their long legged pink wimmen-men, leaving behind their delicious plastic packaging for us to snack and choke on. Hrmph.”

Old Granny Badger scratched her snout and sniffed at the crisp morning cold. “What’s more,” she growled, “I have it on good standing that they mean to turn this entire wood into a strip mall – barring that, an Olympic parking lot. We haven’t forgotten what happened to the Atlanta weasels in the culling of ’96, have we?”

“Nay!” the weasels shouted, “Ma’am!”

“Nor the Atlanta badgers,” she added. “Nor the Atlanta snakes, nor the Atlanta stoats.”

The wood was soon bulldozed, before the uprising came to final fruition. It was not half so sad that the woodland fauna had yet to receive word that the 2016 Olympics was cancelled as the fact that, after the several years painstakingly learning to read, the Chicago badgers had not gathered, from the sparse newspaper litter available to them, that their forest was a much better location for a much smaller forest and a much tidier interstate.

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