The windmill that the animals had spent so much labor on was in tatters. The product their muscles ached to build was scattered around the hill, looking as if nothing was every on top of the hill but rubble in the first place. A heartbreaking, lost silence drifted and suffocated every animal as they stood, staring at the cement and stone.
Napoleon was first to speak, of course:
"Comrades, do you know who is responsible for this? Do you know the enemy who has come in the night and overthrown our windmill? SNOWBALL! Snowball has done this thing! In sheer malignity, thinking to set back our plans and avenge himself for ignominious expulsion, this traitor has crept here under the cover of the night and destroyed our work of nearly a year."
A look of confusion settled over the animals faces, especially each time Napoleon used an especially big word. Then, there was the chaos. Animals cried out for the injustice of their ruined windmill, while Napoleon and his crew jeered them on, as though getting them fired up for revenge against a highly wanted enemy. With each cry of indignation, I studied Napoleon's face even closer. Under all of the posed anger and frustration and empowerment, he looked almost... worried. It soon clicked in my head.
Each morning when all the animals would go out to continue the building of the windmill, I would fly over their progress and wonder to myself why the walls were so thin. Dear readers, Napoleon was trying to take the blame off of himself because he had made the walls of the windmill too thin!! And who was his first resort for a scapegoat? Snowball, of course, who had become the common enemy of the farm and was not there to defend himself.
Even worse, Napoleon claimed to find a trail of pig footprints leading the hedge where Snowball had escaped long ago, sniffing them and claiming them as Snowball's tracks. The truth is, I saw with my own eyes Squealer creating those footprints while Napoleon distracted the other animals with those words! And using my phenomenal sense of smell, the only traces of pigs I could sniff were Napoleon's and Squealers.
Corruption is occurring on the farm. You, dear reader, will be one of the first to witness it. Wish us all on Animal Farm luck and justice.
Squealer making tracks with his trotters. |
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