Karrie's Little Farm

By Karolyn Sue

I decided to write about my true adventures with Henry and some of my other animals after telling a couple of friends about Henry when we were working nights together.

When we first moved to Arizona, we lived in Bisbee for a while, then moved to Pima. After we moved the third time in Arizona, it was to Willcox, and by this time my older brother and sister were teenagers and were tired of moving. My mother was also tired of moving and said she was going to buy some land and stay in Willcox, and that was what she did.

The stories are true from my memories. Henry was the most wonderful, sweet, and gentle pig you could have ever known. He was also very smart, and he had a personality that was just as human as any person you could ever know.

Karolyn raised Henry on a bottle. She had never been around pigs before, but once she first saw him, she knew there was something about him. She had the feeling that Henry was no ordinary pig, that he was very special. She did not mind that in the beginning he would need to be bottle-fed even in the middle of the night, or how messy it was to bottle-feed a baby pig; all she cared about was he was hers, and she knew they would have many wonderful times together as he grew up.

These stories tell about the special love a girl has for her pig and the strong bond of love and friendship that the pig has for his girl.

The love and friendship between Karolyn and Henry is one that only comes along once in a lifetime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646547685

Book preview

Chapter 1

Karrie and Henry Meet

When the move to the five acres was all done and things were settling down, Karrie asked Mama about getting some animals. Mama said pens for them would have to get put up first. She asked what animal Karrie was thinking about getting. She had given it a lot of thought, and Karrie wanted a pig first, then chickens, ducks, turkeys—and the list went on and on. But first had to be a baby pig.

Pigs need a good, strong pen that will keep them from getting out, so Mama had a man come and put up a pen made out of steel pipes. It was what other people used for their pigs. He then made a house for the pig; it was a roof that slanted to the back so the water would run off when it rained. It only had three sides, as he said pigs would get big and needed lots of room to move around in the house, but they also had to have a good house so they had plenty of shade in the summer.

Next, Mama and Karrie looked in the newspaper and found a man selling baby pigs. He said he had two little boy pigs that needed to be raised on a bottle because the mama pig had more babies than she could feed, so Mama made arrangements with the man to bring the babies over for Karrie to look at.

It was a nice, warm, clear, sunny day in March when the man brought the two little pigs over for Mama and Karrie to look at. They were only two weeks old and so small. He said they were American Yorkshire, a breed of domestic pig that was light pink in color, with erect ears. He told Karrie erect meant that their ears would stand straight up when they got a little older, and he said the American Yorkshire was the most recorded swine breed in the United States, but all Karrie cared about and wanted to do was to hold the babies. What breed or how recorded they were did not matter to her at all; how much their ears would stand up was not important, because she had found the sweetest and cutesiest baby animal in all the world, and that was all that mattered right now. She could hear the man saying he would only charge for one of the babies because the other was the runt and no one would want it anyway, so Mama paid him and he left the two baby pigs and went on his