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It was stock taking day in the jungle
And all of the animals were there.
Lions and giraffes, monkeys and toucans,
And hundreds of snakes everywhere.
Every conceivable creature,
All had to be counted and filed
And as I am sure you will realise
This could take a very long while.
So this tough task was given to Wendy,
An elephant who was good at sums,
And also ‘cause no one else wanted
To do it, well none of her chums.
So by lunch time she’d sorted each creature
By species and colour and size.
She’d even arranged all the leopards
By their spots and the shape of their eyes.
But when she put down the final reckoning
She was struck by a terrible thought.
Despite all her fine mathematics
She was still alas one species short.
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Because elephants never forget.
Then up spoke a zebra called Dennis,
‘Oi Wendy, you’ve not done us yet.‘
‘The zebras of course’ chuckled Wendy,
‘How on earth could I forget you?’
‘And with all of our stripes too,’
Laughed Dennis. ‘That’s really not easy to do.’
‘Oh 'eck they’ve got stripes’ muttered Wendy,
‘I must take that into account.’
Let me see, oh yes they’ve got ten each.
That’s going to be quite an amount.’
Now I’m going to bar code you’ said Wendy.
Because you‘re at least ten or more.
Now at this news they all got excited,
Well they’d not been bar coded before.
‘Now though each stripe must have it’s own number,
We’ll label first and last and so then
Starting with Dennis, his rear stripe is one,
So his head stripe will be numbered……..Ten.
‘Now off you go with all these labels,
And quickly get numbering away,
And make sure you don’t take forever,
I don’t want to be here all day.’
When the zebras came back all were numbered,
And it really had not taken long.
But when Wendy went to put them in order,
That’s when the whole thing went horribly wrong.
The thing was she left them to do it,
A mistake as I’m sure you’ll guess.
Up to number eighty they looked very good.
After that it was frankly a mess.
There was a hundred and twenty, and a hundred and thirty,
And then oddly a hundred and ten.
And then the one with a hundred broke down in tears,
And Wendy had lost it by then.
‘Stay calm,’ a voice from above said.
It was Samuel, the owl in a tree.
‘This Zebra Numberline is going to be fine,
So just you leave it to me.’
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Then Sam put them in the right order.
‘Cause the zebras just hadn’t a clue.
I wonder could you do it with him?
Would you know just what they should do?
Well this is how Sam did it. Slowly,
Numbering from left to right,
Every zebra bar coded in order.
When he’d finished it was quite a sight.
‘There,’ said Sam 'all the stripes counted.
And what’s more I’ve a bit of a hunch.
We can now work out how many zebras there are.'
‘Yes’ said Wendy ‘but first let’s have lunch.'
So next time you’re ordering zebras
Take a tip from Wendy and me.
You can use the same rules that Samuel did
And you don’t have to live up a tree.
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