The Cranberry Tales - The Zoo Fence Mobile Version

You are now entering Cranberry County, Maine. This is very friendly country, and you are welcome here.

To save you the trouble of looking for yourself, let me tell you that Cranberry County does not exist on any map of Maine. In fact, it does not exist at all. Neither do any of the people or animals that populate it, nor the events that shape them. However, that is not to say that Cranberry County is not real, for it is. That’s one of the extraordinary things about Cranberry County: It abounds in contradictions.

Curiously, it is difficult to explain just what this story is about, and therefore to know just how to tell it. On the one hand, it is about an ordinary couple, Peter and Anna Wensleydale, who have abandoned the lifestyle associated with a professional career in the big cities of the world, for a homestead carved out of the woods of rural Maine. Thus, in a way, it is a story about the so-called back to nature movement. On the other hand, it is also a story about animals, among them several cats, a dog, a rooster, some sheep, and a horse, who speak to one another and to Peter and Anna, and who get into a variety of interesting and amusing situations. Here, it is something of a children’s story. Further, in the merging and unfolding of all these lives, human and animal, there become apparent lessons for the rest of us, whoever we are and wherever we live, and so it is very much a story of life, too.

Thus, uncertain just how to address it, I have decided simply to relate the story as I learned it, beginning with the Wensleydale’s introduction to Cantachiaro.