They looked at one another, and the youngest of them answered her roughly, “You think you’re a little lordling, don’t you? Who are you to be asking us questions about what we are doing?” But his friend touched his arm and said, “Calm yourself. What are you getting so angry about? She is only curious and bored.” And, turning to her, he said, “Well, sweetheart, we have made a deal with your father, Jacques. He has given us permission to take our pigs into the woods and let them forage on acorns, and we have paid him for the right.”

She listened, nodding, and waited for them to lead the way. The men continued, every so often looking back to see if she was still following them. When they arrived in the woods, the farmers let their pigs loose to forage. But it wasn’t long before they saw they had been cheated. The trees were mostly bare, and there were hardly any acorns left for the pigs.

The farmers crossed to a thin post, a wooden marker Jacques d’Arc had tied with a piece of string, and said to Joan, “We were told we cannot go beyond this boundary.”

They were angry and grumbling, ready to turn back and make their complaints directly to her father, when Joan picked up the post, kicked the dirt over the hole to obscure where it had been, and moved it deeper into the woods, just beyond a patch of trees thick and heavy with acorns. She did this partly to help the men Jacques had cheated—and partly because she just wanted to make her father angry.

Gaping, the farmers followed her and watched her climb the nearest tree and shake the branches. Acorns showered their heads. The next tree she climbed with one hand, the other holding a long stick she had broken off a fallen trunk. She began to beat the branches with the stick, and even more acorns rained down on the pigs, who were no longer jostling one another, now that there was enough food to go around. The pigs moved from tree to tree, trailing Joan, and the men even began to tease her, pointing at a particular acorn hanging at the far end of a limb and saying, “That one! We want that one!” They did this until they felt they had gotten their money’s worth and called her to come down before she broke her neck; they said not even a lizard could be more agile than she was.