The other night, just as I was dropping off to sleep, I thought I heard hooves on gravel. That couldn't be right. It was the middle of the night, and I hadn't heard anyone at the horse's gate. Surely, I was imagining it, right?
But years of sleeping with one ear cocked to the window, just in case the livery horses got out, told me I wasn't imagining it. There were some definite hoof scurrying sounds on the gravel farm road right outside my bedroom window.
Well, crap.
Up and into my jammies and muck boots I went, grabbing my glasses and a flashlight on the way out, just like I'd done countless times in the past. I saw L.E. come out of her house just as I started sweeping the yard with the flashlight, but not expecting to see our kids. Yes, I'd heard hooves on the gravel, but no sound had come from our pen to indicate it might be the Wild Ones. The last "horse break out" had been a few years ago, and those weren't our horses that broke out.
L.E. said that she'd heard shoes on the asphalt and wondered who was riding in the dark, before it dawned on her it could be our horses. The horses must have remembered they're not allowed to cross the street without a human and come back into our yard.
As I swept the yard, I saw Skeeter and Pearl racing around, running and bucking. No Copper. I swept my flashlight to the pen, and there he was, the good boy, just standing inside the fence watching the show. I noted that the gate was closed and the fence looked good from where I was standing. I had no idea how the girls got out, but that was a problem for later. We had to get them caught.
I grabbed Skeeter's halter from the hook, and L.E. grabbed Pearl's. They had calmed down when they saw us, and found a tasty bit of hip-high weeds to munch on. I'm so thankful that all of our horses are "flashlight broke", which is something we intentionally worked on. They know that humans with flashlights or headlamps usually have food/treats and they don't freak out about the weird lights and shadows that come with flashlights. Since they weren't worried about the flashlights, and they'd found some tasty treats, catching them was a breeze. Pearl, with her grazing muzzle, was a little harder to halter, but L.E. got her caught.
We took them into the pen and started looking at the fence. It all looked good as we methodically ran our gaze around the perimeter. And then we got to the truck gate and the last two panels. The gate was closed, but the panels were ... missing.
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| There are usually panels here. |
One panel was folded back against the gate, and another was laying on the ground inside the pen. It made no sense.
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| If I hadn't known better, I would have sworn someone drove through our fence. |
Well, crap. Closing a gate was what we'd anticipated, having to rebuild the fence in the middle of the night was not. We couldn't turn the mares loose while we tried to fix this, so we decided to move the horses to Estes' pen. The problem with that is that it's wildly overgrown. Pearl had her grazing muzzle on, but Skeets doesn't have one, and with her cresty neck, I wanted her in that pen for the shortest amount of time possible. I did not want to risk founder. Which meant, L.E. and I would have to fix the fence in the dark so that we could move the horses back from Estes' pen.
We threw Copper's halter on him, and moved the horses. They were so happy to be moved - they'd been put on a strict diet, and getting to go to the other pen where the weeds were thigh-high was a treat. When we got back to their pen to check out the damage, we found that the panel closest to their shed had been ripped clean off and was the one laying on the ground.
The other panel had been torn away from its "holey tape" as well, and the only reason it was still standing was because of the baling twine I'd put on it forever ago.
The mystery was, and still is, how on earth did this happen silently? Neither L.E. nor I heard a sound. There should have been some thrashing or crashing, or something, but other than hearing the mares' hooves on the gravel, I heard nothing. We looked at the ground for any hint of struggle and couldn't find anything other than the usual hoofprints-around-the-watering-post prints.
L.E. and I worked to put the panels back in their position, or as close to it as we could. We decided that if baling twine had saved one of the panels from coming down, that it would be good enough to hold them together until Jay and I could sink a post to attach the panels to. I had just used some holey tape to attach some repurposed garden gates to the greenhouse, so I knew exactly where it was.
I grabbed the tape, then went into the shop to get the screws and drill to attach the panel to the shed. It was just another moment in life that I was so thankful for Bill's help around the property. A few years ago, he and Mom had come down for a work weekend and he wired the shop. It was a treat to be able to just turn on the overhead light, and pull the rechargeable drill battery off the wall.
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| It ain't pretty, but it'll do. |
I expected that L.E. and I would be working into the wee hours trying to fix the pen well enough to hold the horses for the night. I was pleasantly surprised that it only took us about an hour from the jail break until they were back in their own pen.
Jay works second shift, and pulled into the driveway just as we were haltering the horses to move back into their own pen. Talk about timing on his part! Show up just in time to walk his horse back.
L.E. and I had mulled over how this could have possibly happened. It was a foregone conclusion that Skeeter was at fault. She's the queen of horse yoga, and often sticks her face under the fence to get at the green stuff. She also has a bad habit of pawing at the fence. We weren't sure what she had done, or how she'd done it so silently, but we knew in our gut that she was the culprit.
Except ... she had no marks on her. None at all. I checked her legs, her face, and her neck. Granted, it was at night, so I was checking by feel, but there was nothing to indicate that she was the one at fault. But, who else could it have been?
Aliens.
It had to be. There was no other explanation.
.
.
.
The next morning, Jay and I went to the hardware store to pick up a 4x4 so we could sink a post to attach the panels to. Those two panels were the only two that didn't have a post, because we were afraid to dig near the hydrant when we put all of the other posts up. Now that we've had the automatic waterer installed, I knew that where we needed to put the post wouldn't be near the water line, and it would be safe to dig.
I went into the shop to get the auger to dig the hole, and Jay said, "it was Copper." Huh? "It was Copper." I was still not following him. It was Copper what? "Look at this," he said pointing to Copper's head.
Yep. It was Copper. He had the missing hair on one side of his head and green grass stains on the other to prove he was the culprit.
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| Jerk. And to think I'd been praising him for being such a good boy while the girls were running wild. |
Jay thinks he tried horse yoga and failed. That he got his head stuck and when he backed out, the panels followed him, scaring him enough that he didn't want to go near them to leave the pen. The mystery of who tore down the panels has been solved, but I still have no idea how he did it so silently.
