Jared thought he had been used to hard work. Mowing the lawn on a ninety degree day in late July. Running laps for the coach after not putting for his best effort at practice. Lifting weights when he'd rather be playing a video game to give a little more definition to his physique.
That all paled to how the new donkey felt after his first full day of work on the farm. Aches dominated every muscle. His legs felt as weak as jelly and he could barely turn his stiff neck after spending the day harnessed to a heavy plow.
The day had started in the dark when the farmer, two sons, and three grandsons arrived in the barn and began hitching Jared and the other donkeys to their respective plows. They had a new field for fall planting that needed getting ready. The sound of voices and the glare when someone turned on the barn's naked overhead lightbulbs startled Jared from his sleep.
It had been a sleep that gave him a few hours of escape, but he awoke with someone shining a light in his eyes and, worse yet, forgetting what he was. It came back to him when his objection produced a loud, unwelcome "Hee-Haww!" bray.
While he was still remembering as if through a heavy fog, one of the grandsons began fastening a harness around his barrel-shaped body.
He had come up with a spur-of-the-moment plan. He'd feign ignorance of any and all procedures, a plan so simple that it might have worked but the donkey's lurking instinct seemed attuned to what was now expected. When the men, their ploughs, and the harnessed donkeys reached the field, the donkey embraced, even if perhaps not enthusiastically, the back-breaking work.
It was truly work to test muscle, bone, and stamina. The men lined up the plows and their animals and started in unison. The metal blades slices into the earth and forcefully overturned and mashed the soil, while tossing up clods and rocks to expose the rich, desirable topsoil beneath the harder surface. The plow also had to cut through matted grass and tangled roots from the spring harvest. Jared and his fellows donkeys stretched and pulled on the plows. All the men had to do was follow behind and keep the work on a steady line. When one long row finished, the men would turn the animals and start back across the field in the other direction, back and forth, for hours upon hours.
Toward lunch, a truck driven by a granddaughter pulled to the edge of the field in the shade of a large tree. She carried lunches and drinks for her family and buckets of water for the donkeys. Her brothers helped her unload the tall buckets, one for each of the donkeys.
Jared's throat felt raw, sore, and absolutely parched as he lowered his snout into the warm water held in the bucket. He drank and drank, visibly lowering the level of the water in the deep bucket.
The sweaty, dusty men ate the sandwiches and apples the woman had delivered for their lunch. As the men bit into the apples, Jared's sensitive nose picked up the scent of a ripe, crisp apple and almost salivated thinking of biting into one of the fruits.
The other donkeys, as Jared dreamed of a juicy apple, lowered their heads and began to graze in the grass at the borders of the field. After all that water, a few of the donkeys began to piss, too, in the open, where they stood, which mortified Jared until he noticed that the family took no notice of them.
And why should they? Donkeys were animals.
They were smelly animals, too. As Jared stood dumbly near the bucket of water, flies and biting gnats swarmed in multitudes around his eyes, his ears, and his hindquarters. He felt the insects land and crawl over his large, pendulous balls. Some of them entered his upright, hairy ears. Others tormented him by landing around the edges of his eyes.
His tail twitched and swayed, almost on reflex, trying in vain to scatter the swarms of noxious insects.
His fellow donkeys kept grazing, even as Jared debated whether he should lower himself to doing the same. The hesitation cost him, though. He had barely lowered his head to graze on what appeared a luscious patch of grass when the farmers ended their lunch and he was forced to resume his pulling of the plow. The buckets were left unattended, and the granddaughter didn't return.
After the completion of another row of plowing, his driver directed Jared toward the bucket and allowed him another drink. He would have kept drinking, but the man let him quench his thirst and no more. It was right back to plowing, row after row, beneath a sun that beat down ever more fiercely on his furry hide.
At the end of the day, the grandfather predicted a few more days of steady work and they'd have the field in fine shape for fall planting. Of course, Jared still hadn't a clue to the non-English language they spoke, which might have been a blessing in disguise since it spared him the knowledge that he faced more days of the grueling labor. The sun had moved lower in the sky by the time the men finished for the day. Back at the barn, they released the donkeys from harness. One grandson refilled the water troughs and put out fresh straw for the hard-worked donkeys to consume.
Jared shrugged his heavy body once the harness had been removed, feeling glad to feel free from its constraints. He eyed the straw-filled troughs, but he trudged first to the water and lowered his snout into the wet, refreshing liquid. He drank until he couldn't hold any more.
The distant line of trees looked like a dark smudge as the sunset arrived. By that time, Jared had moved, along with the other donkeys, to one of the troughs and began to gorge on the fresh straw. His jaws worked monotonously as he slowly chewed the fibrous straw. He was still chewing as the darkness encroached and he fell asleep, still standing on all fours.