As I pulled out of the driveway to go to work this morning, I noticed my three horses in a section of pasture where they didn’t belong. (I split up the pasture into smaller sections with electric polywire for rotation). There wasn’t really a problem with that, except if they weren’t smart enough to go back where they came from, they had no water supply. It’s a cool day, they’re eating wet grass, they’ll last until tonight … Naaah .. I better go straighten things out. Turn around and drive back in, and wander out to the pasture.
First thing I notice is there has been some major fence crashing; I wonder if it could have been deer. OK, where are the horses now? There are Arthur and Shadowfax, back where they belong. Where’s Little? Oh .. there he is .. up there where he was .. with Arthur and Shadowfax. Huh??? They’re with Little, but they’re also over there?
OK .. I know it’s Monday, but it’s not close enough to Halloween for me to be seeing ghosts. Yes, I really do have two more horses than I had yesterday, that look confusingly like two of my own. OK, where did these guys come from? I’m pretty sure they don’t belong to the adjacent neighbor. Check the perimeter, and notice a large segment of the high-tensile fence along the driveway is down. Great, they could have come from just about anywhere. So I prop the fence back up temporarily, and start contemplating what to do with the visitors.
I call one neighbor that has horses, and get a spacey teenager. "Hi, I have a couple of extra horses, are you missing any?"
"Um, I don’t know .. ohmygod, I can’t see any of my horses, I have like five, and I don’t see any"
So I describe the two I have, and she can’t figure out whether they’re hers or not, but she can’t see any of her horses. Finally she says she’ll drive over and look at them.
A few minutes later, she calls back to say she has found all five of her horses. So I call the boarding barn down the road and get an answering machine. I leave a message with the description of the horses, but I think these probably didn’t come from there. Next guess is the folks who live next to the cops. I don’t know them, but I’ve noticed horses there. Bill, the retired police horse, likes to hang out at the fence and talk to them.
I’ve never met these folks, and don’t even know their names, so I can’t call them. So I drive over and ring the doorbell. A woman looks through the glass, and takes a minute to decide whether I’m an axe murderer. I’m debating whether to start with an introduction that would just make her wonder why I suddenly decided to be neighborly at 7:30 on a Monday morning. She opens the door, and I cut to the chase: "Good morning. Have you lost any horses?" Her eyes go wide, her mouth drops open, she clasps her hands to her mouth. Maybe I should have started with idle chitchat. I explain that I have two extra horses, describe them, and ask if they’re hers. She says yes, I point across the road, and she says she’ll be right over to get them.
So I go back home, and do a little more fence repair. The two groups of horses have been maintaining a sort of standoff, but after a while, they get a little closer together. And Arthur goes into alpha mode, biting, chasing, and kicking at them. There’s lots of crazed running around and skidding towards fences. If we don’t get them out of here soon, somebody might get hurt.
So I manage to get the two groups separated on different sides of a polywire, with the intruders in a corner of the pasture with a gate onto the road. As long as everybody stays put and nobody breaks any more fences, this is great; they can be led through the gate and across the road to home.
But now they can see home, and their mood changes from "ohmygod, we’re in a strange place" to "ohmygod, there’s where we need to be!" To add to the excitement, Bill notices his neighbors had disappeared and starts whinnying to them. They start hollering back, and make a couple of mad dashes toward the gate, skidding to a stop right before they hit it.
It’s been almost an hour since I talked to the neighbor, and I’m half tempted to just open the gate and let them run home. But they might just run down the road like idiots. So I wander down to the barn and grab a couple of halters and lead ropes, figuring that if I can get my hands on them, which is not certain in their mood, I can just lead them home and ring the doorbell again.
By the time I get back out there, she has appeared at the gate and is leading them home. They don’t appear to have suffered any injuries at all from crashing the high-tensile fence, which is amazing considering the horror stories I’ve heard about the injuries it can cause. If it had been solidly attached to heavy posts, instead of on T-posts with plastic insulators that gave way and let the wire go to the ground, things might have been worse. I’ve heard people say that you want a fence that will break before the horse does; I guess that’s what happened here. I guess all’s well that ends well; tracking down loose horses and fixing fence is more pleasant than whatever is waiting for me at work on a Monday morning.