Hungry as a Horse

by Sibley Miller

  “If you eat those mushrooms, you’re going to get a bad fever!” the mouse squeaked matter-of-factly. “Probably a headache and bellyache, too. Or a whole lot worse! They’re poisonous!”

  “Ack!” Sirocco neighed, dropping all his mushrooms. “What am I going to do? How can I win a cooking contest with only a bunch of dandelion leaves?!”

  “What? Do you think I have all the answers?” the mouse squeaked. He scampered off in a huff.

  “Thanks for the mushroom tip!” Sirocco whinnied weakly after the retreating mouse.

  Then he sighed. “I might as well head home,” he told himself, “and think about plan B.”

  But when Sirocco fluttered into the air, he realized something. He’d done so many twists and turns in his mushroom hunt that he’d gotten turned around! He didn’t know which way home was!

  “Where am I?” he neighed.

  He began dashing through the woods in a panic. After a few minutes of flying turned up no sign of the dandelion meadow, Sirocco threw himself onto a tree branch.

  “I’m stranded in the woods!” he gasped tragically. “Lost! Who knows how long it’ll take me to find my way.”

  Grumble-rumble-groooooowwwwwl!

  Sirocco looked down at his belly. It was feeling miserable, too!

  “Oh, no,” Sirocco groaned. “I’m lost and hungry! What will I do?”

  His desperate eyes fell on the dandelion leaf bundle tucked into his sash necklace.

  “I have no choice!” Sirocco neighed dramatically. “I must eat to survive!”

  With that, he messily devoured his spicy salad fixings.

  “Whew,” Sirocco sighed in relief. “I’m saved. For now…”

  But he still had to find his way out of the woods! Sirocco flew upward a few feet. From there he spotted a break in the treetops—a window through which he could see blue sky, dazzling sunbeams and … a familiar-looking apple tree!

  “Could it be?” Sirocco wondered. He raced through the branches and found himself fluttering above his very own dandelion meadow, near his very own apple tree house!

  “Yessssss!” Sirocco whinnied—until he remembered he didn’t have any ingredients for the Great Wind Dancer Cook-Off.

  “Nooooooo!” Sirocco groaned, feeling foolish. “This couldn’t get any worse!”

  “Oh, it smells delicious, Kona!”

  Sirocco jumped as Brisa’s sweet chirpy voice floated out of the tree house’s kitchen window. Then he groaned.

  “I guess it could get worse,” he whispered to himself. “Not only has my mission to find exotic ingredients failed, but I have to hear about how fabulous Kona’s cooking is!”

  He flew slowly down to the apple tree, cringing with every flutter of his wings. When he clopped into the kitchen, Kona was just pulling two beautiful—and indeed delicious-smelling—parsnip pies out of the oven.

  “Don’t look, don’t look!” Brisa shrieked, cantering over to Sirocco and draping her thick blonde mane over his eyes. “We made these for the cook-off. We want you to be surprised!”

  “Surprised?” Sumatra said. “Who cares if he’s surprised? I just don’t want him to steal our idea!”

  “Oh, I’m sure Sirocco would never do that,” Kona chided Sumatra gently.

  “Yeah!” Sirocco declared proudly. “Because I don’t need to! I have a fabulous plan myself!”

  “Oh, really?” Sumatra said skeptically.

  While Sirocco stuck his pink tongue out at the green filly, Kona set one of her pies on the windowsill and put the other one in the Wind Dancers’ picnic basket.

  “Ooh, I can’t wait to have the extra pie for an afternoon snack!” Brisa cooed to Kona. “Let’s have our picnic by the creek.”

  Sirocco couldn’t help but stare hungrily at the beautiful pie.

  And he couldn’t help but picture the three fillies lounging by the creek and munching their delicious snack—without him.

  But then he imagined himself, doing a cloppity victory dance after winning the Great Wind Dancer Cook-Off. And that got him right back on his what-to-do track.

  “Pie!” he said to his friends, snorting with disdain. “Was that the best you could come up with?”

  “No,” Sumatra said, flapping her ears indignantly. “I also found a perfect ear of corn in Leanna’s garden. I’m going to do something magical with it!”

  “And I’m going to cook something with a Pink Lady apple I found,” Brisa piped up with a dreamy smile. “Something pretty!”

  Sirocco made a big show of yawning.

  “Corn and apples,” he said sarcastically. “How exciting!”

  “Okay, big talker!” Kona challenged Sirocco. “Tell us how your ingredient hunt went. Did you find anything ‘exotic’?”

  “Of course I did!” Sirocco declared automatically. “I found foods you’ve never even heard of!”

  And he wasn’t fibbing. His mushrooms, gooseberries, and dandelion greens would have been fabulous finds—if they hadn’t been poisonous, lost, and eaten!

  “So,” Sumatra asked, looking pointedly at Sirocco’s empty forelegs and sash necklace, “what exactly did you get?”

  “Well … well,” Sirocco stammered, “a great chef never tells! I’ve stashed away my ingredients for later. You’ll just have to wait for my magnificent meal to find out!”

  “Okay,” Brisa said with a smile and a shrug. “Do you want to join us for a snack in the meantime?”

  Sirocco sniffed—taking in the yummy scent of Kona’s pie as he did.

  Which only made him more hungry. Not to mention cranky!

  “Wouldn’t you like that?” Sirocco blurted. “Ply me with lunch and pry my cooking secrets out of me? I don’t think so!”

  Sirocco was so busy acting mad, he didn’t spot the fillies grinning at one another.

  “Now if you’ll excuse me,” the great chef said self-importantly, “I have more cooking prep to do!”

  With that, he darted away.

  CHAPTER 5

  Food Fit for a … Squirrel?

  After leaving the fillies in a huff, Sirocco flew aimlessly above the dandelion meadow. Without his great ingredients, he didn’t know how he was going to win the Great Wind Dancer Cook-Off!

  To cheer himself up, he did a few loop-de-loops and back-flips.

  And that’s when he suddenly realized something!

  “Wait a minute!” he said to himself. “I don’t need exotic ingredients to win the Cook-Off! This morning, after all, I made my Awesome Apple Rutabaga Cunch with random horsy stuff I found in the pantry. I just need to work the same magic again! And with my natural talent, I’m sure I will.”

  Hooray! Sirocco tossed his mane in a way that he hoped made him look like a proud chef.

  He was just about to head back home to get cooking when he spotted a familiar yellow house nearby. The colt grinned. That was Leanna’s farmhouse! He’d flown there without even being aware of it.

  “Maybe before I get to cooking,” Sirocco proposed to himself, “I’ll just stop and pay Leanna a little visit.”

  He was a tiny bit lonely, after all.

  Leanna’s kitchen window was open, so Sirocco zipped over to peek inside.

  Then, he gasped in delight.

  Clearly, the Wind Dancers weren’t the only ones cooking today! Leanna and her little sister, Sara, were standing in front of a big mixing bowl and an open cookbook. They were wearing too-big aprons, and they were surrounded by canisters of oats, flour, and sugar, a box of raisins, a bottle of vanilla, and other yummy-looking ingredients.

  “These are going to be the best cookies at our school bake sale,” Leanna assured her sister with a grin.

  “Well, yeah,” Sara agreed. She popped a raisin into her mouth.

  “Now that’s what I call cooking!” Sirocco said, his mouth watering.

  But as he watched the girls carefully read their recipe, measure and mix ingredients, then spoon balls of cookie dough onto a baking sheet, Sirocco felt his tail droop and his ears sag. The bu
tterflies in his magic halo grew sad, too.

  “That looks pretty complicated,” the colt whispered to himself in a trembly voice. “How is anybody supposed to keep all those ingredients straight? Not to mention their measurements!”

  Natural talent or no, he really didn’t know if he could pull off the Great Wind Dancer Cook-Off!

  Usually Sirocco looked to sweet Brisa, soothing Kona, and steady Sumatra to boost his confidence when it flagged.

  But the fillies weren’t there.

  And he was invisible to Leanna and Sara, so they couldn’t comfort him.

  Which meant he had no one.

  “I’m all alone in the world!” the colt neighed. “And more importantly, in the kitchen! What am I going to do?”

  Before he could come up with an answer, Sirocco was distracted by a scuttling sound on the grass below him. He fluttered off the kitchen windowsill to have a look—and saw two scampering squirrels tussling over a pinecone.

  Squirrels!

  “How could I have forgotten?” Sirocco whinnied, his spirits lifting. “I’ll go visit Gray the Squirrel. He built our apple tree house and he refereed our soccer competition. I bet he can help me with my big problem!”

  With a happy nicker, Sirocco dashed to Gray’s nest in an oak tree not too far away. When the colt arrived, he thrust his nose through Gray’s kitchen window.

  “Gray! You’ve got to help me!” Sirocco whinnied. “I’m nowhere near ready for the cook-off today!”

  The plump squirrel was sitting at his kitchen table, eating acorns. He looked completely unsurprised to see Sirocco’s horsy face poking into his house.

  “Cook-off, eh?” Gray said. “I like the sound of that. Let me guess, it’s you Wind Dancers against the four big horses, right?”

  Gray was talking about Thelma, Fluff, Benny, and Andy, the giant, non-magic horses who lived in a paddock at the edge of the meadow.

  Sirocco shook his head.

  “Actually,” he said, puffing out his chest, “I’m competing against Kona, Sumatra, and Brisa.”

  “A Wind Dancer competing against Wind Dancers?” Gray said, now frowning just a bit. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  Sirocco squirmed.

  “It’s just that, well, it turns out I’m this naturally talented chef,” he explained. “But the fillies keep teasing me and…”

  Sirocco trailed off lamely. Now that Gray had put him on the spot, it was kind of hard to remember why he was competing against his friends. But he pressed on anyway, hoping that Gray would see things his way.

  “The truth is, I’m in a bind and I don’t know how I can top the Awesome Apple Rutabaga Crunch I accidentally made this morning.”

  “Pshaw,” Gray said kindly, waving a paw at Sirocco. “You just need a little help from your friends!”

  Sirocco thought about Kona, Brisa, and Sumatra. He felt a pang in his belly.

  But he felt better when he saw that Gray was smiling at him.

  “I’m your friend,” the squirrel reminded him. “And I’m also a great cook, if not a ‘naturally talented chef.’”

  “That’s true!” Sirocco remembered, cheering up. “You’ve always said that you make a mean Acorn Crunch Cake. But come to think of it, I’ve never tasted it.”

  “Well, I just happen to have my chief ingredient right here!” Gray offered, as he motioned to the pile of acorns on his table.

  “Awesome!” Sirocco whinnied. “Gray, just tell me what to do!”

  And the generous squirrel did just that.

  He showed Sirocco how to crack the acorns under his heavy hooves.

  He gave Sirocco a wire pastry cutter to clamp between his teeth. The tiny horse used it to mash butter and brown sugar together for the cake. Next, Gray had Sirocco add the acorns and bind all the ingredients together with pinesap!

  “It’s got a nice kick to it,” Gray observed. “Much better than too-sweet honey or molasses.”

  “Oooo-kay,” said Sirocco, who happened to love honey and molasses.

  As he filled two baking pans with the chunky cake batter, the colt tried to shake off his uneasiness.

  This is just what I wanted to cook, he reminded himself silently. Something different from our same old appley, carroty, horsy meals. Right?

  Right! he answered himself with bravado.

  But a half hour later—when the Wind Dancer and the squirrel pulled the cakes out of the oven—Sirocco couldn’t help but wonder if he was, perhaps, not right.

  And after Sirocco took his first taste of the Acorn Crunch Cake, it was all he could do not to neigh, “Wrong!!!”

  Because clearly, painfully, crunchy, pine-sapped Acorn Crunch Cake was a dessert that only a squirrel could love!

  “Mmmm,” Gray exclaimed as he crunched and munched his way through his own serving of cake. “Isn’t this great?”

  “It’s, um,” Sirocco said politely, “very … fragrant!”

  Gray paused in his munching to stare at the colt.

  “You despise Acorn Crunch Cake!” Gray declared. “You loathe it. You’d like to chuck it out the window to the woodchucks.”

  “No!” Sirocco neighed. He didn’t want to insult his friend. But every word Gray had said was true, and Sirocco felt terrible about it—until he heard Gray laugh. The colt looked up in surprise.

  “I don’t know why you expected anything different,” Gray chuckled. “This is squirrelly food. You’re a horse!”

  “But I’m a horse who’s supposed to be a gourmet chef!” Sirocco complained. “How can I win the Great Wind Dancer Cook-Off without cooking something that’s extra fabulously different?”

  “Maybe you should focus more on fabulously delicious,” Gray said sagely. Immediately, Sirocco imagined oatmeal muffins, carrot pudding, and apple brown Betty.

  “Or maybe,” Gray began, “you should focus less on…”

  The squirrel trailed off.

  “On what?” Sirocco pressed him.

  “Well,” Gray said, thoughtfully crunching his last bite of acorn cake, “why do you want to win this contest so badly? I mean, all four of you Wind Dancers like to eat the same foods—that is, food that doesn’t taste like Acorn Crunch Cake—”

  “—or gooseberries or dandelion greens or wild mushrooms, either, now that you mention it,” Sirocco realized.

  “Right,” Gray agreed. “And what’s more, Kona, Sumatra, and Brisa are your friends! Who cares who cooks, as long as the food is delicious and the meal is fun?”

  “The fillies care,” Sirocco said. He slumped sullenly against the kitchen table. “They want me to cook more often!”

  “Well, how often do you cook?” Gray asked.

  “Uh … never,” Sirocco admitted.

  Gray chuckled and grabbed Sirocco’s barely touched Acorn Crunch Cake.

  “Seems a shame,” the squirrel mused between critter-crunchy bites. “After all, you Wind Dancers are a great team,” Gray said with a shrug. “Usually, anyway!”

  And that’s when Sirocco realized something. All those belly pangs he’d been having that day? He’d thought they’d been for his friends’ apple muffins and corn and carrot concoctions and berry pies.

  But maybe they’d also been for his friends.

  “Gray,” Sirocco said, grinning at the squirrel, “I’ve got to go!”

  “Where are you off to?” Gray asked, as Sirocco fluttered into the air.

  “I’ve got a new recipe,” Sirocco declared, aiming for home, “that I just must try!”

  CHAPTER 6

  The Great Wind Dancer Cook-Off

  The first thing Sirocco heard when he trotted through the apple tree house door was a burst of laughter from the kitchen.

  The first thing he felt was a cozy warmth.

  And the first thing he smelled was a delicious mix of apples, corn, and pie.

  With a little shiver of happiness, Sirocco clip-clopped into the kitchen.

  “You’re here!” Brisa neighed. “Let the Great Wind Dancer Cook-Off begi
n!”

  Sirocco scanned the dishes on the table. In addition to the tasty-looking pie Kona had made earlier, there was Brisa’s pretty Pink Lady Apple soufflé, and Sumatra’s bowl of buttery roasted corn.

  “Those look pretty good,” Sirocco said casually, trying to hide the gleam in his eye. “But wait until you see what I’m bringing to the cook-off!”

  “Where is it?” Sumatra asked impatiently. “We’ve been wondering what you were planning!”

  “It’s not ready yet,” Sirocco said simply.

  “Not ready yet?” Kona neighed. “But Sirocco, our dishes are ready to go!”

  “Mine will be worth the wait,” Sirocco assured his friends.

  “You see,” Sirocco went on, pacing the kitchen floor, “a brilliant chef needs several things to make great food.…”

  “Here we go again,” Sumatra muttered, rolling her eyes at Kona and Brisa. “The great Sirocco speaks!”

  Sirocco pretended not to hear. He pressed on.

  “One of the things he needs,” he said, “is natural talent, of course. Check! I’ve got that! Another thing is fabulous ingredients.”

  Sirocco fluttered over to the horses’ pantry and threw open the doors. Inside, he saw oats and barley, corn and molasses, raisins and apples, carrots and parsnips, along with dozens of other wholesome ingredients.

  They weren’t exactly exotic foods.

  But every last one of the ingredients was sure to make a horse happy!

  “Check!” Sirocco declared.

  “That’s a change,” Kona said. “I thought our ordinary horsy ingredients weren’t good enough for you!”

  “Wait, there’s just one thing I’m missing,” Sirocco went on. “The secret ingredient that makes every meal delicious!”

  “What could that be?” Kona wondered, her violet-black eyes wide.

  Sirocco stopped pacing.

  He stopping tossing his mane around.

  And he gave the fillies a smile as sweet as a sugar cube.

  “He needs friends,” Sirocco admitted. “Without them, he’ll lose the cook-off, for sure!”