Irascible Drab’s goats were a great bloody nuisance.

Beyond the fact of their general irritability, evolution's chisel had methodically whittled them down into the most frustratingly pedantic creatures to have ever populated anything.

Well-meaning passers-by, proffering a generous handful of grackle-seed to the flock, would be met with a tangle of arched eyebrows, thirty-odd nose flares and four times as many hoof-stomps. In human terms, this would roughly translate as, ‘no, grackle-seed is not, technically speaking, a seed. It is instead a by-product of scarlet tangleroot and, as such, is in fact (all things considered), grackle stem and under no circumstances whatsoever will we be engaging in such a culinary taboo as the consumption of grackle stem, thank you very much.’ These remarks would generally be concluded with a smattering of pretentious laughter and the clickety-clack of self-congratulatory hoof-bumps as the herd meandered off elsewhere. More often than not, this would leave the bewildered passers-by speechless and questioning the moral shortcomings of their altruism.

Of course, grazing opportunities in the village of Scrounge were scarce and such encounters would leave the goats extremely hungry, perpetuating the irritability that gave them all such a negative reputation. With this said, they only had themselves to blame. That is to say, themselves and a few million years of natural selection.

The barefaced rudeness of the capricious collective had for a long time been tolerated by the generally soporific village but as of late, there was something strange in air. The Neighbourhood Watch incident file for caprine activity,[1] once only a page or so long, had tripled in size in the space of a month. And then doubled again. Five months later, it was of such an enormous thickness that it had begun to develop its own gravitational pull, encouraging an eclectic assortment of bite-sized satellites. These included, but were not limited to, a small collection of paper clips, some discarded hole-punch cuttings and a pair of thrill-seeking woodlice.

The more recent pages had been growing exponentially more notorious, ranging from the mildly criminal to the downright villainous. The first significantly worrying skirmish had taken place one cloud-covered autumn morning. A disoriented postman by the name of Coot Bracken had entered their grazing field and while politely enquiring about directions to the nearest depot, was ambushed from behind, bundled into a potato sack and dangled upside-down from an overhanging tree branch. In a quite literal case of adding insult to injury, Coot was then forced to watch an entire week’s worth of written correspondence chewed into oblivion. The man was understandably distraught, with the administrative complications alone posing a nightmare that would last for months to come.

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Even this circumstance was nothing compared to the story recounted by the community vicar, who had (only a week before) reportedly been kidnapped from his clergy by a small herd masquerading as nuns, thrown into a hay-bale wagon and subsequently ransomed for twenty crates of fresh radishes.

The general opinion of the Scrounge Neighbourhood Watch was that these chaotic acts of violence were, when it boiled down to it, simply a passing amusement for the herd. The problem was, they were swiftly getting more organised. Something simply had to be done.

*

The goats defied any notion of ownership, dismissing it as an archaic model of human-livestock relationships. They opted instead to describe themselves as the ruling class of the village. The goats did however have a patch of field that they had decided to call home, which just so happened to be a stretch of land surrounding Irascible Drab’s base of operations, the Drab’n’Go Snack Shack.

Thanks to his close physical proximity to the flock, the Neighbourhood Watch had delved into the village fete pot and, while keeping him at an arm’s reach, begrudgingly bestowed upon Irascible the role of Scrounge goatherd.

Irascible was a greasy little man with beady eyes, crooked teeth and a murky background. His broken nose found itself permanently thrust ahead of the rest of his body, in a similar fashion to that of a peckish, gravity defying cartoon pursuing the scent of a freshly baked pie. Except in this case the cartoon was an unscrupulous purveyor of black-market goods and the pie was, in most cases, someone else’s money.

On the theme of pies, the main problem was that Irascible had fingers in a great many of them. The majority of these pies were, shall we say, of an extremely dubious quality. In fact, had they not been figurative, they would likely have been filled with nails, or perhaps illegally sourced sea urchins.

The point of the matter was that his colourful variety of business ventures resided firmly within the greyer areas of polite society and, unsurprisingly, all transpired to be a great deal more interesting to Irascible than traipsing around muddy fields after herds of generously horned livestock. Such was his allergenic attitude towards anything that remotely resembled an honest day’s work that he had decided, in what can loosely be described as his own budget brand of infinite wisdom, to employ an apprentice goatherd…

*

And so begins the tale of the Pickled Onion. Irascible Drab, a pitiable husk of a man with little to no redeeming qualities, who certainly lacks the strength of character to hold up the rest of this story on his own crooked back, journeys off in search of a more protagonistically inclined apprentice…

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[1] See the village of Scrounge’s annual Bulletin for Affirmative Action Against Herds