Mountain Pikas are very serious rodents. They look like little brown hamsters with great big, round ears. They live in the rocks were they work very hard all summer long. You see, pikas don't hibernate so they must store lots and lots of food. All summer long they cut grass and lay it out on the rocks to dry. Then they store their hay in their burrows for the long winter. If you sit and watch them, they are always running: into the meadow, cut the grass, carry the grass back to the rocks, lay it out, back to the meadow. Work! Work! Work!

And can you imagine how awful it is to sit in a dark burrow all winter long? The television reception in the mountains is very poor and they don't have cable so they get very tired of reading the same magazines over and over and over again. Pikas are cute and are often used as examples of industry and the work ethic in the animal kingdom, but it really sucks to be a pika!

Once there was a pika named Jonathan Livingston Pika. His parents named him after a sea gull they read about in a book some campers left beside the trail one summer. One day Jonathan found some eagle feathers that had fallen among the rocks. He had a great idea! Birds do it. Butterflies do it. Even funny looking bats do it. Why couldn't he? Why couldn't he fly south for the winter?

Now this was a great idea but the rest of the pika community thought he was crazy. "If you don't get busy and store more hay, you'll starve this winter Jonathan!" Papa Pika said.

"You'll break your silly neck!" Moma Pika added.

But Jonathan wasn't to be discouraged. He found some string and some old chewing gum at a near-by campsite and soon he was ready. He tied the feathers on his little legs and climbed to the top of the highest mountain. It wasn't easy dragging those feathers up the peak, but at last he made it.

Jonathan stood perched on the edge of the abyss and all of the pikas looked up from their work. The time had come. Jonathan took a deep breath and then launched himself into the great, blue void.

The wings worked! He flew like an eagle but unfortunately, he wasn't strong enough to flap his wings. All he could do was glide down, down, down, down into the valley.

Fortunately he landed on top of a Winnebago with Florida tags and two weeks later the pika colony received a picture of Jonathan wearing sunglasses with a frosty cold drink in one hand and his other arm was wrapped a pair of shapely, bikini-clad sea otters.

MORAL: Things don't often work out the way we planned, but somehow they work out anyway.