The tractor’s tale

The red and blue tractor

The little lego girl, Jaz, drove her red and blue tractor up and down the field in the sand tray. It was a bit boring. Up… down… up… down she went, getting hotter and hotter in the afternoon sun. She wished Ben would think of something else for her to do.

She liked Ben. The other children always played with the police car or the fire engine, and made loud noisy stories with lots of accidents. But Ben liked to do other things, like race his cars, make gardens and houses, or shift sand with the digger. Today he was ploughing fields. Or rather Jaz was.

Suddenly, without warning, a cow jumped out in front of the tractor. Jaz slammed on the brakes.

“You silly cow,” she shouted. “I nearly knocked you over. Why are you wandering over my nicely ploughed field?”

The cow mooed sadly and told Jaz what had happened. “The wind blew so hard in the night that it knocked down the fence round our field. And now my calf, Daisy, has gone missing.”

“Oh dear,” said Jaz. “I’ll keep an eye open for Daisy while I’m ploughing my field. But please take care not to get run over!”

Jaz was now happy to plough up and down. She wanted to help the cow find her calf.

“Daiseeee!” she called every few minutes.

Ben made her drive all round the field, looking behind bushes and trees. She also looked into the ditches that drained the water. But she didn’t find Daisy.

“I’ll have to call in the police,” said Ben with a sigh. “They’re good at finding lost things.”

Jaz was upset. She didn’t want the policeman to come. She wanted to be the one who found Daisy. So she crossly made some zig-zag lines with her plough, so that it would be difficult for the policeman to walk around the field or drive his car across it.

Ben brought in his cleverest sheepdog, too, and made them all search high and low for Daisy. But when supper time came, there was still no sign of her. Her mother was mooing quietly in the corner of the field and refusing to eat her hay.

Jaz drove the tractor back to the farmyard. Just as she was getting out, she heard a funny muffled sound.

She jumped off the tractor seat and raced to the old wooden barn. She had to pull really hard on the door to open it. And there inside was Daisy the calf, lying on the floor and whimpering in the dark. Her hoof was caught in some wood that had fallen on her.

“Oh Daisy!” said Jaz. “What happened?”

“The wind blew the door shut and then I couldn’t see in the dark,” said Daisy. “So I stumbled into the wood pile.”

“I’ll go get the policeman and Ben,” said Jaz. “Between us we’ll be able to lift this wood off you.”

It was nearly bedtime before Daisy was free. By this time, the sheepdog had guided her mother all the way down to the farmyard. She licked Daisy and mooed her thanks to Jaz for rescuing her calf.

“We all helped set her free,” said Jaz. “I was just the one who found her. Now you take her home, and we’ll mend the fences so that Daisy can’t get lost again.”

And that’s exactly what they did. But they didn’t have to worry about the noise of their hammering and nailing. Daisy was fast asleep after her adventure, and her snoring was the loudest sound in the field!

The moral of this tale is that you often need to work as a team if you want to get something done.