Dear Pandas,

I bet you can tell how excited Ella and I are about finally being able to ride horses around Panfu. Ella has been especially impatient. For days now she’s hardly said a word to me – all she does is read about horses all day! And now that she knows all about each horse breed by heart, she struts around like she’s an horse expert or something. Even though she’s never even sat on one before!

So what? You’re obviously just jealous. I know exactly how to ride a horse. Theoretically speaking, that is.

Ha! I’d like to see that. I think that if you want to be good at riding horses, you need a lot of patience. And what was that yesterday? I can tell you one thing, it wasn’t patience!

Okay, maybe you’re right about that. Things really could have gone wrong. It was a close one!

Tell me about it! Do you Pandas want to know what happened? Yesterday, Ella had the glorious idea to sneak into the stalls just to prove to me how great of a rider she is. I thought it was stupid, but I didn’t want her to be alone, so I went along.

Everyone knows you’re afraid of the dark, Max. Okay, maybe I am too, but just a little. But I just had to go! Everything in Panfu appeared creepy at night. It was all so quiet and there wasn’t a light to be seen. Everyone was sleeping peacefully. We walked on our tippy-toes so that no one would hear us. As we opened the door to the stall, it creaked and groaned like some animal. Max was right behind me. I turned around only to see my buddy Max covered with little beads of sweat and eyes wide-open.

Yeah, I was scared! You didn’t see my knees – they were shaking like pudding!

Yup, like Jello! But we decided to keep on going, doing our best not to make a sound. Inside it was so dark that we couldn’t see our hands if we held them right in front of our faces. We felt around on the walls for direction. Suddenly, there was a huge crash! Max had knocked over a bucket of oats. The horses became more scared than we were, whinnying wildly while kicking the air with their front hooves. At this moment, we decided to leave. We did a complete 180 and started to run when suddenly the light came on and someone yelled, “Stop!”.  Horsey the horse hand stood in the middle of the stall, armed with a pitchfork and angry. He had locked the doors behind us and we were trapped.

We couldn’t get out! Oh man, my heart beats like crazy just thinking about it!

We tell you the rest of the story tomorrow.

Nah, tell ‘em now! Fine then, tomorrow. I’m going to go relax a bit now and play some Mahjong.

See you tomorrow!

Be good Pandas,

Max and Ella