As the cool autumn air settled in, Cluck, Peck, and Rexie the golden T-Rex sat around a pile of leaves near their new forest home. They were now the best of friends after all their exciting adventures, but a new problem was ahead of them: gathering enough food to last through winter.
“We need to be smart about this,” Cluck said seriously. “No guessing this time. We need to count.”
“Count?” Rexie tilted her big head. “What’s that?”
“It’s how we figure out how many things we have,” Peck explained. “If we don’t count right, we might not have enough food!”
Rexie nodded. “Okay. Teach me.”
Cluck and Peck began teaching Rexie how to count. Cluck lifted one claw. “One,” he said. Then he raised another claw. “Two.” Peck joined in, lifting his claws as they counted together: “Three, four, five, six, seven, eight.”
Rexie held up her tiny arms with two claws on each hand. “I have four more claws,” she said proudly.
Cluck beamed. “Eight plus four is twelve! We have twelve claws to count with!”
“Twelve!” Rexie roared happily. “That’s a lot!”
But Peck looked worried. “What if we find more than twelve berries? How will we count them?”
The friends paused, feathers and scales ruffling nervously. Cluck frowned. “Oh no! What if we can’t count past twelve? We need to figure this out!”
Just then, a little squirrel darted by with a stick full of acorns, like a tiny skewer. The squirrel stopped, looked at the trio, and started sliding acorns off the stick one by one to eat them.
The chickens and Rexie stared. “What is it doing?” Rexie whispered.
Cluck’s eyes lit up. “That is how we can count! We need something like that stick!”
The three got to work. They gathered sticks, vines, and small stones. Rexie used her strong claws to carve smooth beads, and the chickens tied them onto sticks with the vines. When they were done, they had a giant abacus big enough for all of them to use.
Peck slid one bead to the side. “One.” He slid another. “Two. Now we can keep going past twelve!”
Cluck laughed. “And ten beads on the bottom stick can mean one bead on the top stick. We can count up to a thousand or more!”
Rexie roared with joy. “We can count all the berries now! Or nuts! Or velociraptors!”
The three friends laughed as they practised counting everything they found in the forest. By the end of the day, they were ready for winter, and they had proven that even tricky problems could be solved with teamwork and a little creativity.