It is the last day of daylight savings time and I just have time to do something with the horse.  I don’t really have time to saddle up and ride, so my choices are ride bareback or go “walkies.”  Since it is just above freezing with a cold wind outside, and since I haven’t ridden all week, I decide on a walk.  First, I must don the appropriate amount of layering—long underwear, sweats, long sleeved t-shirt, fleece jacket, gloves, neck gaiter and headband.  I test it out on the back porch—brrr…  I go back in the house and add a pair of wind pants.  Okay, now I think I’m ready.  The wind pants mean that I won’t be able to hop on bareback if I feel like riding at some point.  Have you ever tried to ride in wind pants?  It’s like trying to ride a greased pig!

I decide that today will be a “cookie” walk.  Usually I don’t carry cookies , but I have found that if I do an occasional cookie walk—where I stuff my pockets full of goodies and let them know it—the effect lasts a good long time.  And for these girls at least, I guess hope springs eternal because they generally stay with me even when they know I don’t have anything.  They must figure I have the power to magically conjure cookies on a moments notice, so they’re not taking any chances.  Only they have to earn their cookies.  They have to go off and graze, then put effort into coming back to me—only then do they get the reward.

I let them out, and Annie immediately begins shadowing me.

“Cookie?” is her obvious question.

“No cookie,” I say, gently shooing her away.

Dolly closes in from the other side “Did you give Annie a cookie?  Because I want one too then!”

“No cookie,” I repeat, gently shooing her the other way “ you have to earn them.”

So we wander down the ridge and they finally begin moving off to look for the clumps of dried grass that are still hiding among the sagebrush.  As we leave our property, Dolly stays behind to munch on some weeds then trots to catch up.  I reward her with a cookie.  Annie trots over indignant, so she earns one also.  It becomes a competition between them.  They watch each other as closely as they watch me.

We reach the bluff that overlooks a large wash.  It is a short steep drop into the wash proper.  The girls stop to graze on some nice clumps of grass at the top of the bluff.  As I slither down the hill, I wonder how long it will be before the angry scars of recent flash flooding will fade away.  The hillside is cut by dozens of parallel erosion channels leading down into the wash.  The wash itself is a mess.  Where there used to be a soft sandy floor, there is only hardpan and harsh gravel.  The banks no longer slope easily, but are cut deep and jagged.  I hear both Dolly and Annie clattering down the bank behind me.  Dolly finishes with a flourish by cantering through the sagebrush and coming to a screeching halt beside me.

“Cookie?”  Yep.

We choose to cross this wasteland and seek the nicer footing above the far bank.   Dolly gives a little hop and halfhearted trot—sorry, not enough effort.  We continue across the wash to the far bluff where there is an abundance of bunch grass.  Both Dolly and Annie know this place and immediately tuck in.  I find a nice rock halfway up the bluff and sit to enjoy the world around me for a while.   Grey clouds punctuate a crystal clear winter sky.  To the west are the strato-cumulus, soft and fluffy, but to the east are dark grey lenticulars, sculpted into fantastic shapes by the winds aloft.   It is the golden hour where the quality of light is at its best.  The sky to the east appears to be a darker shade of blue even though the sun is still above the horizon.

If I had enough talent to write poetry, this is the time and place I would most like to write about.  Too often, people mistake the desert for a barren wasteland, but it is not so.  Down below me, there is a sandy channel with the tracks of the hundreds of small animals who call this little area home.  There are ground squirrels and chipmunks and a whole multitude of rabbits living here along with dozens of lizards, their tails marking their tracks as reptilian in origin.  It is too cold for lizards or their shyer cousins the snakes right now, but during the summer, they dash away in all directions as I walk through.  There is a large covey of quail that roam this area and will sometimes explode in all directions when I venture too near. Their tracks are all there, telling me stories about the lives they lead.

In addition, there are the larger animals that prey on all of this fare—the coyotes, hawks and eagles that I will occasionally spot as I walk or ride the horse.  One of the most amazing things I have seen is a Golden Eagle taking wing from about ten feet away when I startled it away from a rabbit it was eating.  And there are the unseen animals—the pocket gophers and packrats and mice who only make their presence known by causing a mess in my haystack or horse trailer.   I have even spotted a few foxes over the years, though usually late at night when I was driving home.  They live there, all of these animals, because there is plenty of food in the form of bitterbrush, pine nuts, and the seeds of the many grasses and flowers that grow abundantly here if you know where and when to look for them.

Annie stops by for a scratch.  She knows I won’t give her a cookie, but she will stop by for a scratch just in case I make the offer.  She enjoys the scratch almost as much as the cookie anyway.  Dolly is slowly moving up the bluff now, so I climb to the top.  She canters the last few strides and earns another cookie.  Annie, of course gets hers as well.  We decide to head downhill today and make a big loop around to the left that will bring us back home.

Suddenly, a flock of birds rises out of the sagebrush and flows downhill like quicksilver.  The sun glints brightly off of their wings and they make a high pitched “chee, chee, chee…” as they fly.  Then another flock and another, rising with one fluid motion, then flying nap of the earth, skimming the top of the sagebrush in ever widening circles until it looks like a giant maelstrom of tiny birds.  And then they disappear, settling back into the sagebrush as suddenly as they ascended—invisible again to the outside world.

We find another patch of nice grass to graze on for a bit, then I continue to move off to the west.  There is too much grass here, though, and Dolly is thinking about ignoring me and moving away into better grazing so I move off in the opposite direction.  I find an unexpected ally in Annie who sees her chance to hog a few cookies as she follows me.  She almost makes it, but at the last moment, Dolly gallops after me and catches up just before Annie does.  They both get two cookies for leaving such good grass to be with me.  As I continue to walk down slope, paralleling the wash, Dolly canters off to the right, then circles around to stop right in front of me again—I think she has the idea!

I keep trying to get one or the other of them to pose for a picture with the big lenticular behind them against the bright blue sky, but they don’t cooperate.  We finally cross the wash again about a half a mile below where we did earlier and continue south towards home.  As we walk, we pass the “sheepherder shacks.”  David and I call them that because the sheepherders sometimes camp there, although we don’t know what their original purpose was or who built them.  Dolly is always fascinated by the junk that is laying around loose near the shacks.  Today, she noses at an old hunk of plywood on the ground as the sun finally slips behind the mountains.  Soon, we won’t even have time for this luxury after school.  Our walks will range closer to home if we can take them at all.  For now it is enough to enjoy the perfect twilight and the companionship of our little herd.

I love my crazy neighbor because he is an enabler.  He has enabled me to buy new fences and nice new horse shelters.  He enabled me to begin building a turnout area—I mean buffer zone—protecting the horses from his stallions.  He even enabled us to buy a tractor!  What a guy!  And now (by the laws of deductive logic), he is enabling us to buy all sorts of implements for our tractor.  Those of you out there who own tractors know what I am talking about.

A typical trip to the feed store:
Me:  What is that implement thing out there on display?
Feed store guy:  It’s a Lurminator.
Me:  I need one.  What does it do?
Feed store guy:  It Lurminates.
Me:  How much does it cost?
Feed Store Guy:  $700
Me:  Here is my credit card.

After this, I go on my merry way, secure in the knowledge that A.  If I ever need to Lurminate, I will possess the correct implement and B.  Any tractor implement under $1000 is worth having.

We bought this blade.  But it couldn’t be just any blade.  David did his research and it had to be a Swiss Army Blade that will not only fold, spindle and mutilate, but has those teeny-beeny tweezers in a pocket so that you can pull out any annoying little splinters.  And we bought an auger, which it turns out consists of several parts (sold separately) such as the “arm thing” and the “spinny things,” which come in several different sizes—small, medium, tall, venti, and ridiculous.  Buying an “arm thing” without at least two “spinny things” is kind of like buying Malibu Barbie without also buying the Malibu Convertible, Malibu Ken, Malibu Beach Mansion and optional Malibu Sunglasses (for both Barbie and Ken, naturally).

So we drove home triumphantly from the Tractor Supply Company store with our latest kill and, somehow, David managed to assemble the whole shebang.  (Little known fact:  Albert Einstein died of old age while trying to assemble the “arm thing” for his tractor.)  And we drove the tractor to a place on our property that I had scientifically determined would be the absolutely correct place to put a fence post and we drilled our first hole!  And it was one foot deep… Because after the auger went down about a foot, it hit a layer of soil that geologists refer to as “concrete,” and then it just sat there spinning happily away, but not actually doing anything useful in terms of what geologist refer to as “digging a hole.”  And now you know why I hate my crazy neighbor.  I am quite certain that he is down there living in his disgusting, filthy trailer with his stallions running around loose because he has crappy falling down fences, looking through his expensive high powered telescope at us struggling to dig post holes—and LAUGHING AT US!  I’ll bet he lets his stallions out every few weeks just so he can come up and laugh at our feeble efforts at erecting a fence to keep them out.

At first, we worked really hard at this project.  We would dig any time we had a spare day.  We began by drilling the 12” holes for the big posts that would be our corners and gate supports.  These holes needed to be 4 feet deep, so you can see that a 1 foot hole just wasn’t going to cut it.  We discovered that by pouring water down the 1 foot hole, we could soften up the soil and a few days later, we could drill it all the way down to 15 or even 18 inches deep—progress!  We also discovered that through the use of backbreaking labor with a “rock bar” we could loosen up the soil for the auger and make another inch or two of progress.  And occasionally, we were lucky enough to actually dig an entire hole at which point, we would put a post in it and celebrate.  Our property began to look like we were sprouting a random crop of railroad tie trees.  We also had to purchase an “extension thing” for the auger because, at first, it would not dig a 4 foot hole—silly auger.  (I guess you could call that auger augmentation.)

And we discovered the existence of “shear pins.”   A shear pin is an evil piece of equipment that is designed to protect your auger from being bent (HA! We’ve proved that one wrong) by breaking anytime it thinks the auger might get damaged by hitting a rock or a tree root, or if it’s a little stressed that day, or if it had one too many cups of coffee or has PMS, or somebody sneezes or a rabbit runs in front of the tractor.  We discovered that it is not humanly possible to possess enough shear pins to get through an entire post hole digging operation, because due to Newton’s fourth law of Shear Pins, you will always have one fewer shear pin than you need to finish the hole!  We now measure our hole digging efforts in terms of SPU’s or Shear Pin Units.

“That was an easy hole—it only broke four shear pins!”

And then we stalled out…

And when I say we stalled out, I’m talking about “for several years” stalled out, not just for a couple of weeks or months.  We were killing ourselves physically, not to mention wiping out the shear pin population of Northern Nevada, and we still had some holes that we had made ABSOLUTELY NO progress on.  There were these divots on the ground where holes were supposed to go and that was as far as we could get.  There was one corner post where we had hit a rock about 3 feet down and we absolutely couldn’t get around it without dynamite or some sort of tactical nuclear weapon.  Oh, we had tried a few different “tricks” that our “friends” had told us about.  (Like pouring very diluted battery acid down the hole to dissolve the clay?  Ignoring our fears about poisoning the environment on the theory that it would be worth it to create 6 legged horned toads if we finally had a fence, we tried this—it didn’t do diddly squat.)  We think now that our friends were down at Tom’s using his telescope and laughing along with him.

And then Providence showed us the way…  Our neighbors down the hill decided to put in a fenced yard for their dogs.  They didn’t actually do it themselves—they had some fencing guys do it for them.  I watched this project unfold over several days driving to and from work and finally had to stop and ask—“HOW THE HELL DID THEY DIG THOSE POST HOLES!”  I probably said it a little more nicely than that, but that was the gist of it.  It turned out that they had used a Bobcat.  The difference between the Bobcat and our tractor is that the Bobcat possesses a mysterious, magical force known as downpressure.  This would be like having a second tractor jump up and down on top of the auger while the first tractor was digging the hole—BRILLIANT!

So we rented a Bobcat—actually a “Skid Steer” (because it is made by Case and not Bobcat).  Whatever it was, it was pretty reasonable to rent—only about $100.  Of course, it cost $200 to have it delivered and picked up, and each of the two augers cost about $100 to rent, but it was still worth it.  The Skid Steer had downpressure and it didn’t have any shear pins on the theory that if you got it stuck enough to bend one of these augers, you would create enough force to spin the planet Earth off of it’s axis causing global devastation anyway.  And we dug 52 holes in two days!  I sure hope Tom happened to notice that we were out digging and thinking to have himself a knee slapping afternoon, glanced through his telescope at which point his eyeball must have shot cartoon like out the other end of the telescope in amazement—take THAT!

We don’t, at this point, have any actual fences yet.  All of the wooden posts are in, though.  They march along in straight lines instead of random patterns, beckoning to me.  Now all we have to do is install all of the H’s, drive about a gazillion T-posts and string fence.  And now I can truly say “Thank you Tom, for enabling us to go out and buy a T-post driver implement for our tractor!”

Some of you know I have a crazy neighbor.  And when I say I have a crazy neighbor, I mean that literally.  And when I say literally, I mean that in the literal sense of the word literally, not the metaphorical (or hyperbolic) sense as in “like literally” which translates into:  I think I am really exaggerating when I say this, but I’m literally showing my ignorance because I don’t know what the word literally means.  But I digress.  Anyway, somewhere out there, there is a test—I believe they are referred to by the politically correct as “inventories” such as the ABC1 or OCD3, and if you administered this test to my neighbor “Tom” (we’ll call him, not that that’s his real name), he would qualify as having some actual (literal) mental disorder.  Using my vast knowledge of psychology (gained from one high school class and one college class) I have decided that he is schizophrenic or bipolar or maybe something else. Actually, just understanding that he is literally mentally ill has made the situation easier for me to deal with.   I now have a sense of humor about it—he’s not a jerk, he’s just nuts!  And I’m not angry with him anymore.  Even though sometimes I really want to scream at him “Take a bath! Get a haircut! Put on clean clothes! and Get a job!” I understand that he is not truly capable of these things, so I am free to deal with him on his level and not expect too much.

Anyway, apparently God talks to Tom and somewhere along the line God told Tom that he needed to own three horses.  This is according to my other crazy neighbors who have talked to him (and now I mean crazy in the metaphorical sense of “wacky” or “a little off” which are strict requirements on the entrance exam for those moving into our neighborhood).  According to the neighbors, Tom has two grown children hiding out there—I mean living somewhere else—and God told Tom that his children would return to him and they would all need horses to ride.  No one seems to know when this would happen or where God told him to ride the horses or if God told him to ride English or Western or use a bitless bridle or go shod or barefoot or anything interesting like that.  Whatever is supposed to happen hasn’t happened yet and we’ve been here going on ten years now.  So Tom started with one appaloosa mare and (I’m kind of speculating here) bred her to produce a colt?  Then either he bred her again or maybe she bred with her colt?  I don’t like to think about that one, but the end result was another colt.

The problem is that God left out one very important piece of information that belongs in this puzzle.  God forgot to tell Tom to geld these colts.  Tom actually  believes that God has told him it is a sin to geld a horse, which is sort of counterproductive to the situation.  So time passed… and they grew up… and now they are full-grown stallions… and I have a mare… and eventually they figured that out.  So one day, they showed up at our place to “visit” my mare.  They broke her out of her electric corral and fortunately, she was so freaked out about being chased around by two crazed stallions that when I opened the gate of a solid pipe corral, she shot in there as quick as she could to get away from then and I slammed the gate in their faces.  God also seems to have forgotten to tell Tom to teach them manners.  You (metaphorically) could not pay me enough money to stand within 10 feet of one of these horses.  I’m not afraid of them, but I’m not stupid either.   Neither is Tom  (stupid I mean)—he may be crazy, but he is smart enough to know that leaving his horses rampaging around our property might be a bad idea.  He came right away and got them.

Thus began a long cycle of stallion visits from one or the other or even both of the two stallions.  And thus began a series of corral upgrades on my side of things.  Can you see why I love my neighbor now?  Well, first, the horses had to have all pipe corrals—no more electric fence.   So we bought a bunch more pipe fencing.  And they needed better shelters, so we bought two more of those.  The shelters had to be well anchored to prevent them from blowing away which meant digging holes to pour concrete posts to attach the shelter to.  The holes were really hard to dig, and how were we ever going to move the dirt necessary to fill the foundations?  You guessed it—we had to buy a tractor.  Then the whole shootinmatch needed to be enclosed in a perimeter fence so that the stallions could rampage to their heart’s content “over there” and not near my horses.  So I drew up plans to fence off about 10 acres with our little horse area on the inside.  Then we moved our “bathroom shed” which has a composting toilet over to the horse area so I now have a little tack/storage shed, but also a bathroom.  I often feed in the dark in the winter, so David has installed “much needed” lighting.

I have not, yet, figured out how to justify a new saddle or a real hay barn or a new trailer out of this, but I’m working on it.

And for those of you who wonder why I don’t “do” something about the stallions, I don’t have a lot of options.  Fencing them out is the Nevada way of dealing with them.  I could probably shoot one of them and claim self defense and get away with it, but I don’t blame the horses for this situation.  It would be better if I tried to shoot one and missed and “accidentally” hit Tom, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t get away with that.  I have offered to pay to have the horses gelded, but Tom just said that God would think that was wrong.  I have even considered offering to buy the two horses and gelding them myself, but I’m pretty sure Tom wouldn’t sell them to me (he’s crazy, not stupid, remember?  He knows the first thing I’d do to them.).  One friend and I came up with a wild scheme to put a loudspeaker under Tom’s trailer and speak to him in the middle of the night:

“TOM! THIS IS GOD!  GELD THE HORSES!”

But hatching that scheme is one thing—carrying it out would make ME certifiable—and I mean that—like literally.