On a beautiful spring morning on the Ponderosa, Ben Cartwright was ready to sit back and relax as the cavalry went and did all the work. The cavalry being his three sons, Adam, Hoss, and Joe. However, Hoss was in San Francisco with Joe, so Adam had to do his brothers chores. He wasn’t complaining, but he hoped that Joe and Hoss would get to do his chores for a week when they came back.

The hardest of the tasks Ben gave his son would have to be chopping up an old tree that came down on the road leading away from the Ponderosa into Virginia City. Obviously, it had once been Hoss’s chore. Adam got right to work, and soon had loaded up most of the wood into the dray. And it only took him an hour to do it.

Adam stopped to have to have some water when he realized that it was almost nine o’clock. He didn’t want to spend the rest of the day chopping up a tree, so he loaded up the rest of what he chopped and pushed the rest into the trees.

 The next thing he had to do was sleuth out a cougar that had killed a few calves. Seems like an easy task, right? Well, if you know the Cartwrights, you know that there will be some kind of trouble.

 Adam drove the dray back to the Ponderosa and let one of the hands take care of the wood. There was only one hand that wasn’t helping with the spring roundup. Adam saddled his own horse and took off back the way he came.

 After about an hour of following the cougar’s tracks, the tracks suddenly came to a halt. There was a strange silence. Confused by the tracks, Adam dismounted and realized that there was blood on the ground, taking the place of the tracks. He followed the blood stains on foot, until they stopped altogether, in front of a tree. There were a few dozen broken limbs on the tree, but other than that, there were no signs to indicate where the cat was.

 ‘Probably went up a tree,’ Adam thought to himself. Sighing, he figured that the cat was going to die after having lost so much blood, so he started to mount his horse. But then, there was another silence.

‘Okay, this is-‘ Adam never finished his thought. Because then a whole dray of squirrels came lurching out of the trees, down the path, everywhere! Without mounting his horse, Adam took off running. If you had seen him, you’d think he was on the Olympic track team! The fat, bloated squirrels came charging after Adam. One almost smack dab in the middle of his forehead.

‘They’re flying out of trees!’ Adam thought as he ran through the woods. He stepped on a prickly cactus, and then fell to the ground, unconscious.

A few hours later.

When Adam woke up, he didn’t know where he was, or what happened. Then he remembered the squirrels. When he sat up, he felt a bandage around his head, and smelled something cooking. Adam then saw a young girl, perhaps 20 or 21, kneeling in front of a pan of beans over a hot fire.

“Hello,” the girl smiled. “I’m Audrey.”

Well, Adam thought to himself.This day might now be so bad after all.