Seven-year-old Vanyatka helps her mother: drives pigs around the yard, hits them with twigs. Then Vanyatka runs to his father’s stable, watches him lubricate the cart wheels. “Vanyatka wanted to do everything that adults do, but she didn’t have enough strength.” The boy himself decided to fasten a collar to his horse, but he himself was caught in a harness and hung under a horse's neck. Father gave him a slap. Vanyatka drove the calves up the mountain to graze.

It's time to mow. Mother leaves Vanyatka to look after her two-year-old sister Nyurka. The boy, leaving his sister, ran away to the mowing, but after a little thought, he didn’t show himself to adults there, as he knew that he would be punished for his unattended sister. He ran back past the three mounds. Then he saw a bunny fighting off a kite. Vanyatka rescues a bunny with a pecked eye.

“The bathtub, holding it carefully, carried it back:

“Oh, you are a heart guy! .. My darling ... poor thing ... Look, damned, how is he you! ..”

The hare began to live under a barn in a hole. During a terrible thunderstorm, Vanyatka got scared and ran out into the street. There he found an abandoned puppy. “Immediately the fear passed, the feeling of abandonment, loneliness.”

The puppy and the hare became friends, began to play together, slept together in the wallet.

One night thieves crept into the courtyard. The puppy screeched, and the hare drummed its paws out the window. Vanyatka’s father woke up and grabbed his gun: thieves and the trace caught a cold.

So the animals fell in love with adults. They gave nicknames: a puppy - Zabiyaka, a hare - One-eyed.

Vanyatka did not part with them. “Wherever he goes, the shaggy, smoky Zabiyaka cowards in front, and behind the One-eyed one he makes two or three jumps, becomes a column and turns his ears ...”

In the fall, Vanyatka wanted to go to school, like all his comrades, but his father said that he was still too early.

The boy himself ran to school in the rain. He put on his father’s boots, threw a sack of rain. Since the boots were large and drowned in mud, Vanyatka had to pull them by the bootleg and rearrange their hands with their hands.

Zabiyaka and One-eyed followed him. Vanya began to drive them home (he shouted “Let's go! .. I’ll kill”).

When Vanyatka was already in class, everyone noticed that a hare and a dog were looking out the window. Teacher said that was not good.

Upon their return, Zabiyaka and One-Eyed met Vanyatka on the road.

In the spring, the hare ran into the forest, Zabiyaka began to guard the yard.

Vanyatka worked in the yard tirelessly in the summer, and in the winter he ran to school in his father's felt boots.