Adventures with bad horses

Adventures with Naughty Horses:

The horse company is down by the Etowah River, which forms a natural fence to one of the fields. At least it seemed to until this morning, when Mabeline the Bucking Queen decided to go for a swim.

We discovered this when a guy on the other side of the river started yelling at the owner's wife (really, she is the main partner in co-ownership). He said that one of her horses had swum the river, and was headed toward the highway. This information was relayed to me, along with a suggested crossing point ("If you go down by the middle field, the river is much less deep there.")

So I ran across the field, took off my boots, rolled up my pants, and began to cross the river. I discovered that it was not in fact very shallow at all once you got about halfway out. Still, I managed the crossing with no difficulty beyond being in to my upper chest. (Later, the lady herself wandered down to see if I had returned to the mare, in company with a young woman. She said, the younger lady reported to me, "Wow, I guess I was wrong. If he crossed here, he got soaked.")

The next piece of bad information turned out to be "toward the highway." The river is crossed by a state highway about two miles north -- it is audible when the big trucks go through. Anyone who had the slightest sense would, therefore, have intended "toward the highway" and "north" to be the same direction.

However, the road this guy lives on departs the highway to the south, then turns west and back north again, but terminates before returning to the highway. It is shaped like the letter J, with the highway making the top line on the J, and this fellow living near the end of the curved line on the side heading back up toward the top of the J. Being the sort of person who buys a house in the country and then apparently never goes outside, he had no sense of direction at all. He meant that the horse was headed in the direction that, if you were going that way on the road in your car, would eventually lead to the highway.

In other words, south.

And the guy was long gone.

It took about fifteen minutes for me to examine the area and determine that there was no evidence of a northbound horse, and very strong evidence that suggested it was unlikely: dogs in the area, fences she would have had to cross, and an older gentleman who reported having not seen any horses. He might have been napping, but he seemed to be busy with a woodworking project.

Moreover, there was no obvious sign of where Mabeline would have emerged from the river. She isn't shod, but she is a big girl. There should have been at least occasional tracks, but nowhere by the crossing point were any such evident.

As she crossed by a point where the Etowah has confluence with a small creek, I determined she must have gone up the creekbed. Unfortunately, as you will doubtless know, creekbeds going away from the river and into the upcountry branch repeatedly. These are stony bottomed creeks, and it's been very dry lately, but there were a few places of soft ground that could be examined for tracks.

I eventually determined her route, but it took more than two hours, and the route led straight into empty country. Calculating how far she could have traveled, I figured I ought to let people know where I was going before I went after her. So, I hiked back to the nearest road (recovering the young lady, who had been dispatched by the owner's wife to search near the road).

Fortunately, someone had thought to notify the sheriff's department, and they had put the word out to local farms. It turned out she'd wandered up on one a good ways south along that route, eventually coming back out into the pasture of another farm down the way on that side of the river. They'd stuck her in a barn until they knew who she belonged to.

So that is how I spent today: crossing rivers and tracking animals, trespassing on all sorts of people's land. I didn't find the horse, but I did find her trail; and also the prints of deer, one young male bear recently in the area, and coyote; saw several live frogs and birds and squirrels; and met a kindly old gentleman at his woodshop. I also ran across a historic still, and a witch's house in the forest (I gather from her license plate, marked "CRONE," and all the Wiccan stuff around the house).

In other words, it was a great day. These horses should get lost in the woods more often.