"Natalie Tjodbjørg Bjørnson," resonates a woman's fine voice through the wooden hallway, as the morning sun gleamed over the hills and through the windows, " ... the bus is here!" Her blonde daughter rushes out, carrying her green bag behind her, zipping through the front door and the porch. Along the way, she takes out some carrots out of her right pocket, and leaves them behind the white picket fence for her Shetland pony to eat. As the pony walked over to its little "breakfast", she boarded the college bus, and it went off to his left on a cloud of dust.
Now, Shelby is on his own. He gallops around his vast enclosure. If this still bores for him, he trots to visit to his sunny stable, with all of its windows and its doors welcoming in the fresh spring air and the late morning light. He can play with the collie, provided that the farmer releases him into the pony's enclosure. He could have a fun time rolling on the mud with the pigs. He might come near the poultry pens, and scare off the chickens, ducks, and geese for his own pleasure and amusement. On the event in which some neighbours come outside and have their lunch, he would watch.
When the farmer goes out to feed his lunch, he goes to the chickens first, the ducks afterwards, then the geese, the pigs, his collie Bimo, and lastly, Shelby. The pony's lunch is the usual hay-and-apples (or carrots) course.
On the blazing afternoons, the farmer works on a patch of his yard opposite Shelby's enclosure, and places Shelby into a harness to plough the fields. At 5 p.m. , the college bus stops by the front yard, with Natalie and her two brothers coming home (amid Shelby's cheerful greetings) after a long and exhausting day of studies and sports. After the pony's identical-course dinner, Natalie and her father guides the animals back into their pens for the night. Natalie then continues her homework, watches a baseball match with her whole family ("Go, Bisons, Go!"), or plays games with her brothers. Shelby then joins the animals, after their bored fidgetings, into their individual journeys into their cloudy dreamlands.
Friday nights were somewhat different, as Natalie goes out in the evening to attend a baseball training session, and her brothers come out to stargaze into the dark sky with their neighbours. Occasionally, Shelby and Bimo can stay outside for just a while, within the former's locked-gate compound.
Saturdays were more different, as Natalie wakes up an hour earlier to jog outside with her brothers on the streets. where there is a row of pines beside the sidewalk. She then mucks out his stable pen, and with a brother's help, they carry it by wheelbarrrow across the field to a compost pile in the southeast, well away from sources of water (even sprinklers) and neighbours, and dumps the manure there. Leaves, twigs, and other stuff were also placed on it, along with the occasional artificial fertiliser, to speed up the process. In some Saturday nights, the Bjørnsons go out to Montchalons Stadium to see the Bisons pit themselves against various other teams and clubs, from the Durangos, to the Broncos, to the Cardinals-and-Torontos.
On Sundays, the Bjørnsons go to church up to noonday with the whole neighbourhood. They sometimes take five plastic boxes of "salsa-salad" some of the congregation prepared for post-service lunch. The nights were spent on more stargazing, hectic studying-and-revising, or radio listening.
However, a few months later, Shelby starts to periodically walk into the shady apple orchard, deep within his enclosure, and closer to the outermost fence and a dark forest. He starts to kick the apple trees to get their juicy treats, but unbeknownst to him, one of the trees has a nest, on which a little blue bird resides. As months pass into the next summer, this corvid can't take it anymore...
