Episode 3: Untitled

Ivan's ears pricked up to hear someone running with a quick, light step up the path. "Father!" He instantly recognized the voice.
"Jnii!" he groaned. He was by this time clutching at the crotch of his pants for fear of the inevitable. Jnii stuck her face right up to his own and smirked.
"Whack the hack, whack the hack, whack the hack!" she chanted, then giggled in an ugly sort of way. Jnii, Falti's daughter, was an older girl, seventeen or eighteen, with generally a bad disposition. Not bad-looking, but always a little dirty (like father, like daughter). As she matured, she was developing a certain destructive, unpromising liking for men, which worried her father so much that he was always (when not chasing chicken thieves) watching her like a hawk.
She stood back and smiled at her father running after the fleeing man. "Jnii! Help me!" Ivan cried in desperation.
She looked at the boy and rolled her eyes. "All right," she said, and after some labor, got the ropes loose and let him fall to the ground with a thud. He stood and instantly ran to the nearest tree, turning his back on Jnii.
"Father!" she yelled, resuming her previous purpose. "Father, come back here! You'll never catch him!" Ivan turned and saw her smile in a self-satisfied way as she continued to stare at the two figures in the distance. The rider disappeared behind some trees, and Falti came lumbering back. Ivan sat down in the grass and rubbed his sore ankles and ribs.
"Damned chicken thief," Falti muttered as he approached his daughter. He eyed her suspiciously. "I thought you was feeding them chickens. Where was you while he was out pinching them from the coop?"
She smiled and shrugged her shoulders, her hands on her hips. "I wasn't feeding the chickens. I was making a pie."
"I didn't see no pie in the kitchen."
"I was out picking berries for it."
Falti looked at her skeptically and then noticed Ivan in the grass. "You! Boy! Run yourself home before I give you a boxing you've never had in your life!"
Ivan scrambled to his feet and scampered off in the direction of home, but not before he saw Jnii smile at her father smugly and saunter off toward her non-existent basket of berries, ready to be made into a pie. He prayed that he wouldn't have to face a caning for being so late home, but even moreso he prayed the children were not waiting in the next lane for another round of that damnable "whack the hack."