Not about horses

My farrier asked me yesterday why it was I thought that it was almost all girls who were drawn to horses.  I said that I’d come to the conclusion that the male brain was, by and large, geared towards the mechanical rather than the organic.  You have your mechanical girls and your organic boys, but most of the time you find that once boys discover engines, as in cars and motorcycle, the type of male who would have been predisposed towards horses, becomes preoccupied by these.  My farrier laughed and said that’s exactly what happened to him.  No coincidence that his relationship to horses is now an entirely technical; and immensely valuable; one.

I do see boys who love horses and are shamed out of it and that makes me very sad.  Until that changes, the fact remains that, for the time being, Kids Love Horses is 100% girl and the girls end up talking about girl things like how two girls, both in 3rd or 4th grade, walked up to Beba, who is in 2nd grade, and said, “You’re not a girl if you touch snails.” Followed by, “you’re not a girl if you put mice in your hair”, two things, evidently, Beba is known for.  Their parting comment was, “If you want to be a girl, you have to wear a skirt!”

Hearing this made me so angry I started to shake.  I had some suggestions for Beba, but I don’t know if my suggestions or my turbulent emotion was of any help to Beba so I turned the problem over to “the girls”.

Rachel, who is ten, had a similar response: “I’d hit them.”  She then tempered this with she’d think about hitting them, but not do it.  Nicole, who is also eight, was very quiet for about five minutes, then said, “that was mean.”  Katie, who is nineteen, never wears a skirt, dyes her hair blue, sports a nose ring and has obviously had more time to think up responses to these sorts of situations, said, “If that’s what being a girl is, that’s not very much fun!  I’d rather have fun and be a ‘not-girl’.”

The next set of kids, who rode Thursday, had a completely different set of responses.  Julia, who is thirteen and tends not to say very much ever, laughed.  Not a nervous, self conscious laugh, but a real belly laugh.  She said, “That’s funny!  I would just laugh in their faces and walk away.”  Victoria, age fifteen, said, “When I was a kid, I liked playing with dinosaurs.  My friends didn’t like it that I played with dinosaurs, but they got over it because I didn’t stop.”  Her suggestion to Beba was to bring some mice to school and give them to those girls to put in their hair.  Priya said, very matter of factly, “No!  That’s ridiculous!  You can’t change your biology.”  And that, she felt, should settle the matter.

Friday’s crew brought a deeply empathetic response from Magnolia and lots of talk about disliking skirts, the crowning moment of which was when Allison, a very petite, eleven year-old with a high, reedy voice and crazy, curly black hair, climbed up on to the bed of the truck and pronounced, “If you don’t love horses and you don’t love getting dirty, then you’re not a girl!!!!”  This was met by cheers from all present.

Saturday has the largest group of riders.  They were no less emphatic.  Some of them, like Maya, had a quiet response and would have simply not responded and walked away, unaffected.  (This is VERY Maya.)  Shani would have said, “Back Off!”  Emily would have told them, “Don’t bully me!”  Emily then told a story about how, in second grade, she’d done just that and it had worked.  Molly and Elizabeth, both twelve, told me, very seriously, that they’d like to “have a talk” with those two girls.  Elizabeth and Molly then spent the next half hour digging worms out of the manure bin and playing with them.  Shana, who is thirteen, said, very seriously, “the mean girls know to leave me alone.”  I said, “Shana, I don’t think that’s an accident.  How did you make that happen? What should Beba do?”  Shana gave this five or ten minutes of thought, after which her face brightened and she said, “OK.  So this what she has to do.  On the first day she should  . . . ” What followed was what can only be described as campaign, thoroughly plotted and energetically executed that involved no insults or confrontation, but plenty of very direct performance.  Shana came up with five days worth of suggestions before we moved on to another task.

Among all the creative and brilliant ideas that the girls came up with, what surfaced as a common theme with all of them is that they detest skirts.  Not all of them, just most of them. If they came up with a protest chant it would be, “We hate skirts!  We hate skirts!”  Savannah, who wears all sorts of frilly do dahs in her hair and generally prefers pink, sequined shirts, said, “Yeah!  I don’t even own a skirt!” These girls will wear pants to their weddings.

This has been so amusing, I’ve been sharing the story.  Yesterday I told the story to my landlady, Jan.  Jan is about as easy going, even keel and diffident a person as I’ve ever met.  I have rarely seen her even mildly agitated about anything and wasn’t expecting anything in the way of a response about the “no-skirts girls”.  Jan got the biggest smile ever and danced a little jig! “Yeah! Just like me!”

Ironically, one pair of pants is in the mending pile and the other three are in the wash, leaving me with only a skirt to wear out to the horses this afternoon.  I’m bracing myself for a thorough ribbing.

 

This is a picture of Molly and Elizabeth digging worms out of the manure bin:

Solstice Celebrations

“I have it!  I have a jacket! In my pocket!”

Maya was cold.  The wind that had been blowing the rain sideways had died down and the rain was light as snowflakes, but Maya’s pile had cease providing much in the way of protection an hour prior.

The weather report had said rain in the afternoon, but the water vapor satellite and radar said the heavy rain would be done before one.  The weather report also had a high winds advisory, with wind expected to die down by 10am.  The forecast was wrong on both counts.  The heavy rain was done by one, but the high wind started up around 10 and, at 1, when the girls were gathered at the barn, the wind was blowing their pony tails into their faces, the paddock was a clutter of swirling walnut tree leaves and Magnolia’s reusable, light weight bag with a picture of a carousel, when emptied, took flight and, we presume, now resides in some random tree in Los Altos Hills.

For Maya, Maggie, Shana and Julia, Friday was the first day of winter break and the ONLY place any of them wanted to be was on a horse.  Riding was particularly dear to Maggie,  ”I’m going to be gone for ten days!  We are going to Mexico.  I don’t want to go to Mexico. I’m from Denmark!  In Denmark, Christmas means snow!”  Maggie’s parents obviously feel that Christmas without snow is just fine, but Maggie added, “If I have to go to Mexico, I just can’t miss the last day I can ride!” – Weather be damned!

The wind would die down, the question being when.  I told the girls we could hand walk the horses to the arena and if it was still blowing like the NASA wind tunnel, we’d have to turn around and hand walk the horses back.

On the walk over to Campo, Stoney jumped several feet in the air when a frisky dog scurried quickly up behind him, something that ordinarily he wouldn’t have given a second thought.  The girls have fifteen years of horse experience between them.  It was a dramatic performance, but the girls weren’t phased.  It did give me pause for thought, though.  ”Maybe we should leave Chavali at the barn.”  ”Well, yeah, duh” was the collective response.  Flighty on a good day, leaving miss spook bomb at home, despite her plaintive whinnies, was a no brainer.

As the girls got Velvet and Freedom ready, I rummaged through the tack room and found a plastic bag to cover and protect the leather of an expensive, new saddle, if needed, and also, without thinking, grabbed my fluorescent yellow bike jacket.  The wind made it unsafe to tie the horses, so sat on the mounting block and held the lead ropes of Stoney, Cowgirl and Freedom and Freedom got groomed and tack.  Dropping the plastic and the jacket on the ground was not an option due to the wind.  Neither was holding on to them with my hands.  I did what I often do with big, bulky items that I need to transport, but can’t hold on to.  I shoved them down the back of my bike tights.  This looks absolutely ridiculous, but is a solution for transporting things, like halters and plastic bags, that can’t be tied to saddles.

The girls were ready to go in about fifteen minutes.  Maya, Maggie and Julia were mounted.  Shana, who tends to procrastinate, was still flitting about.  I called her over and handed her Freedom’s reins, then stood up and turned to pick up Dante’s leash as I would be on foot.  Shana starts laughing with tears coming out of her eyes.  Less than a second later, Julia, who is one of the most contained, reticent people I know, starts laughing so hard she almost falls off the horse.  Clearly, walking to the arena with a giant bulge out of the back of my pants was not going to do.  I stuffed the plastic bag into one, already broken, jacket pocket and the bike jacket into the other.  Why I didn’t put the jacket on Maya at that point, I can’t say, though it probably had something to do with the internal debate about whether or not it was too windy to ride.  Julia and Maggie had water proof windbreakers on; green for Julia, pink for Maggie.  Shana was wearing the most stylish, yellow, body contoured, with artistically applied reflective “stripes”, jacket that could be imagined.  Maya just had on her turquoise pile.  Maya said, “I’m fine!”  I did not believe her.

The girls could be considered experts at riding the pathways of Los Altos Hills. Though the wind provided a challenge, the girls did an admirable and responsible job of negotiating the fallen strips of Eucalyptus bark, knocked over trash and composting bins and the occasional flying plastic bag.  The wind did indeed die down about five minutes after we arrived at the arena.

Julia galloped Velvet around the arena while Shana ate her lunch. Then Shana galloped while Julia ate.  Magnolia decided she needed to warm up so she put a lead rope on Cowgirl and, on foot, because Maggie runs faster than just about anyone I know, cantered Cowgirl around the arena and over jumps.  Maya schooled Stoney over canter poles.  They all took a turn riding Freedom bareback.

With these girls, under normal circumstances, I barely have to watch as they are all very experienced and capable.  But today, I stood inside the arena, at the alert the whole time, holding a horse or a saddle or a lunch as needed, all the while thinking I should check the arena shed for a jacket for Maya, but not wanting to turn my back.  ”Finding” the jacket in my pocket set them all to laughing again.

With the wind died down and everyone out of town, we had a peaceful a ride back to the barns.  Magnolia, who has a lovely voice, sang Danish Christmas carols to us.  Because of the misty “rain”, our entire ride; to, at and from, the arena; was accompanied by a never wavering, full rainbow.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Aria

“Where are you? Are you coming to the arena?”  The answer to the first question was, “running down a pathway trying to keep up with five, trotting horses.”  To answer the second question; we were heading away from, not to the arena.  Aria doesn’t meet us at the arena every week and she’s only four.  Eleven year-old Molly has taken a shine to her.  She leads Aria around on the pony for fifteen or twenty minutes at the end of our time at the arena.  Then we always leave and leave a distraught Aria for who would probably eat and sleep on top of the pony if she could.  But she’s too young for anything in the way of instruction and it’s just not safe to cart one so young around on the trails.  I hadn’t exactly forgotten Aria.  I was expecting her the following week.  Even so, I felt badly.

“Are you available at 2:30?”  They were. “Can you meet me at the dirt patch behind Gardener Bullis School?”  They could.

The “dirt patch” was, at one point, an honest to goodness arena.  I’m sure at some point “The Town” will build something one it, fence it off or put in an off limits to horses sports field.  But for the time being, it’s being used as a dumping ground for dirt from town construction projects and in this capacity, makes a fabulous horsey play place and an ideal spot for walking a four year-old around on a pony.

The Saturday morning riders finished their trot around the pathways, which included cantering, multiple times, across Clark’s field, ending up exhausted and happy at the Jensen’s barn.  Savannah departed for a christening party.  Molly and Elizabeth went back home to Elizabeth’s house where they would, most likely, continue playing at being horses.  Julia and Victoria stayed at the barn, fed lunch to horses, ate lunch themselves,  mended a horse blanket, and rested, then headed back out, with me, Stoney, Cowgirl and Freedom, to the “dirt patch” behind the school.

The day was cold and brisk. Stoney was full pep and Victoria charged around gleefully.  Julia had decided to work at riding bareback and wasn’t charging around and fortunately, for her, Freedom seems less influenced by the weather than Stoney.

Aria finally showed up, with mom, dad and older brother in tow.  The look of desperation on her tiny, brown face was heart wrenching.  When they arrived at the arena to find it empty, Aria has been beside herself.  Four years old and she had been counting the days until she got to ride Cowgirl again; her life was revolving around it.

Aria is not content to just sit there and bounce, like most kids.  She actually wants to learn how to ride.  She holds her hand up and off the saddle when I tell her to; she is trying with all her might to learn to post.

Victoria charged, Julia balanced and Aria bounced/posted for about half an hour until I felt like I just couldn’t stand anymore, at which point we all headed back for the barn to call it a day.  Julia put Freedom back in the pasture.  Then it was time for Julia and Victoria to take Stoney and Cowgirl back to the barn at Quail Lane. Aria tiny, brown fingers gripped the pommel of Cowgirl’s saddle as if her life depended on it.  She looked stricken, after all, she’d almost not gotten to ride.  I said, “In a perfect world, Aria, you’d get to ride everyday.”  Victoria added, “and I wouldn’t go to school and I’d ride all day everyday!”  Ignoring the interruption, I continues with, “but the world is as it is and that means you get to ride once a week.”  

After Julia and Victoria rode off, Aria, being held in her mother’s arms, got a tour of the barn at Campo Vista.  Then we got to go to Quail.

Victoria and Julia had already gotten Cowgirl and Stoney untacked and were cleaning the paddock in preparation to feed.  Unlike the barn at Campo Vista, at Quail, the kids can roam to their hearts content and roam she did and so did her six year-old brother; through the orchard, up and down the paddock, in and out of the tack shack, around and around both of the horses.  Aria stood blissfully leaning against Cowgirl’s leg in the aisle of the barn.  The sun had set.  Between the cover of the aisle, the onset of night, Aria’s dark skin and black hair, her face was almost invisible.  I was sitting, keeping my distance, at the base of the driveway.  I hollered out to her, “Are you happy yet?”  Barely indistinguishable as she was, you could still tell that she was beaming.

The last task of the evening was to give Cowgirl her pergolide pill.  This involved going into the hay room. Julia, Victoria, Aria and the brother all disappeared into said room.  They did not emerge with the pill.  They stayed and stayed.  But it really was late.  Aria’s mother opened the door and gave her the “five minute warning.”  I asked what they were doing.  They had not forgotten about the medication, but they had gotten sidetracked by drawing pictures on the white board.

I told Aria that it really was time to go because I had to go pee and, unlike her, it wasn’t fitting for an adult to pee in the paddock. This was true, but I would have said so even if it wasn’t because it was one of the few explanations that a four year-old will understand and justification for sympathy.  Aria has gone home to, again, count the days until Saturday and the barn at Quail lane now has a very nicely decorated white board.

Support

The soccer field behind Gardner Bullis school sits about fifteen feet above the rest of the school property.  It’s always a toss up between whether to risk traffic and electronic gates on Campo Vista or to pass by a soccer game behind the school.  Usually we chose the school and usually there isn’t a soccer game.  There was today.  You can’t tell until you are just about on top of the field whether there is a game or not.  There is plenty of room for us to pass safely.  We only have to cover 100 yards, but about half way across we always hear, “Don’t look at the horses!  Look at the ball!”  As we descend the slope from the field down to the playground, we are inevitably trailed by three or four children, usually female, all of them looking like they’d give their right arm to hop on the horses and join us.  Today was no exception as three eager faces, full of longing, appeared at the edge of the rise, all of them desperately trying to think of a way to keep the horses around for just a few seconds longer.  My standard reply is, “I hope you get to take riding lessons soon!”  In response to which they start eagerly jumping up and down.

(For the record, we don’t make a habit of riding the horses through school grounds.  We are barred from the school property until 4:30 pm, weekdays.  For the rest of the time, there is a pathway easement that runs through the property.)

Today’s riders are Savannah, Julia, Victoria and Jill, with Jill, who is 5’9″ and bean pole thin, riding 12.2hh Cowgirl.  The planned ride is to head for Clark’s field. Clark’s field is the quickie ride. The girls wouldn’t stop yacking so we got a late start and were left with about an hour of daylight.  The Clark’s field ride also takes us through the middle, and more heavily trafficked area, of Los Altos Hills.

On leaving the school property we cross Fremont only to be stopped by an older woman driving a white Mercedes.  ”Oh I LOVE seeing the horses!  This reminds me of when my girls were young.  They used to ride all over Los Altos Hills on their horses!”  Because I stopped to chat, I’ve gotten behind the girls.  There’s is short stretch of pathway up to where Manuela comes in that is perfect for a little canter, which has served to widen their lead.  As the girls cross Manuela, a family of five, all adults, walking on the opposite side of Fremont, have all stopped and are waving and hollering and smiling at the horses and their riders.  They have stopped their walk to enjoy watching the horses go by.

The girls proceed down Fremont towards Town Hall, which is, fortunately, downhill and I can catch up in time to over hear an older woman saying to, I assume, her granddaughter, “See that horse there? That was just like my horse when I was young; a palomino!”  Whether there were more comments from more passers by for the next mile, I don’t know, because they kept up a brisk trot and I trailed them by several blocks.

Clark’s field was delightfully empty of people, allowing the girls to run the horses back and forth across it to their hearts content and run they did with tiny Cowgirl bringing up the rear.  When Jill rides CG, her feet almost touch the ground and her torso is as tall as Cowgirl is long.  Cowgirl has to run so fast to keep up with the other horses that her legs of the chestnut pony make a blur of red.  With the tall figure of Jill balanced atop, it was a sight that belonged in a cartoon, the humor of which was not lost on the girls and was thoroughly enjoyed by all.

By the time the girls were done romping through Clark’s field, it was almost dark.  The walkers and players had gone home. We didn’t encounter anyone else until we finally crossed back over Fremont to head down Campo Vista towards the barn.  As the last horse crossed Fremont, a girl is a passing car shoved her body out the window and yelled, “HORSES!!!!”  Sigh.

Today was probably the last beautiful day of fall, which accounted for the larger than usual number of encounters on the pathways.  But we have days like this regularly.  Every ride, every day, at least one person stops and smiles and waves because they are happy to see a horse; not a horse behind a fence or a horse riding in circles around an arena, but a horse out and about and in their midst.  That’s the true, real magic of it.  Go to a town council meeting and you’d never know it was the same town.  It’s hard to imagine a wider gulf between the administration of a municipality and the people who live there.

“I’m so glad you like the horses. When you get a chance, could you let the town council know?” This request is always met with a dismissive nod.

“Have you heard about LAHHA?  Would you consider joining the horsemen’s association?”  The response to this is, “But I don’t own a horse.”

What these people don’t understand is that the power struggles and petty concerns of an unhappy few will create enough collateral damage to make backyard horse ownership untenable. If the horse fans would just speak up, even just a little bit, the places of the horses would be secured.  But most people just don’t seem to understand how tenuous the presence of the horses is.  Horses in and around Los Altos HIlls will be lost if they don’t speak up and how sad would that be?

 

Photography

“OK Maggie, you guys can canter across the field another time and go ahead and blast through the last part.”  Maggie, age 11, is in the lead on Velvet, followed by Skylar on Chavali and Rachel on Freedom, who is the slowest horse, but please don’t tell him that!  The field is “Esther Clark Park”; City of Palo Alto Open Space, although I’m sure most residents of Los Altos Hills think it belongs to them.  Clark’s field is our favorite blast path.  Rarely visited, we usually have the 3/4 mile path to ourselves.  When the rains start, the path becomes slippery and dangerous for horses.  But until then, the girls have been packing in extra runs across the field.

Of all the horses, Velvet can really move.  She’s not even close to being able to keep up with a thoroughbred.  That doesn’t mean she’s not fast.  As far as Maggie is concerned, the faster the better.  Theresa and I; and Cowgirl and Stoney; waited at the destination end of the field, me holding the horses, Theresa wielding her camera, or rather her ipod with ten (free) photography apps downloaded on to it.  As they headed down the last stretch of path I hollered. “let her rip!”. I think it was the first time Magnolia had experienced the full potential of Velvet’s speed and as they approached end of the path, the look on Maggie’s face became more and more alarmed.  Staying on was not the problem.  The question was, how was Velvet going to stop?  At least that’s what Maggie thought.  Velvet didn’t have a problem making a jaunty little zigzag and come to a stop right before the concrete.  But Velvet’s plans did not take into account whether or not Magnolia would stay on and she didn’t.  As Velvet dodged one way, Maggie started to slide off the other.  Magnolia, the most athletic kid to ever ride with me, managed to hang on for the second or two it took for Velvet to change direction, tossing Magnolia to the other side for a second and she would have stayed on if there hadn’t been one last twist, but by this time Maggie had figured she probably wasn’t going to stay topside. She decided her best course was to lean over and grab Velvet’s neck.  As Velvet’s feet finally came to a stop, Maggie slid, gracefully, off, rolling into the dried grass on her backside.

“Theresa!  Did you get that?! Did you get the picture?”  

“No!  It jammed.  It jammed just at that moment! But I did get a picture of Velvet with all four feet off the ground.”

I’m a little worried.  I’m wondering just how long it’s going to be before Theresa figures out she can charge me for her photos.

Theresa was one of the more difficult riders to start. She was fussy, moody and fractious.  Every kid has a “hook”, but hers was hard to find.  One day in the arena she grabbed my iphone to take a photo and that was it.  Her camera and now her camera and ipod come out with her every ride day and when they run out of battery, she takes my phone.  ”Picture!  Picture!!  P-I-C-T-U-R-E!!!!!” is the punctuation of a trail ride with Theresa.  She has agreed, after some scolding, to properly tack up her horse, but participation in every other way involves a camera.  When the rest of the girls were performing the exhausting task of running Stoney around the Jensen’s pasture, Theresa was running around with a camera in each hand.  ”I need five right hands!”

It’s not exactly the most focused way to learn riding, but her riding is improving by leaps and bound despite her preoccupation with the camera, whereas before it was fits and starts.  I guess it takes more than a little riding skill to take a photo from horseback.

As for Magnolia, her mother now finally has a photo of her daughter flying across Clark’s field.  Too bad we don’t have documentation of the creative dismount to go with it.

Raccoons

Victoria asks, “Animal, Vegetable or Mineral?”

CLaire, who is riding just in front of Victoria on the trail, twists in her saddle to look at Victoria and replies, “Animal.”

To eliminate the obvious, Victoria asks, “Is it a mammal?”

Claire, twisting again, says, “Yes.”

Twenty questions is Claire’s favorite long trail ride past time.  No one has ever counted the number of questions.  It usually takes upwards of an hour of guessing to get to the answer, but not this time.  Victoria had already guessed at the answer.

“Does it have sharp teeth?”

Keeping looking forward, Claire hollers, “Yes!’

Standing up and out of the saddle and fiercely clutching the reins, Victoria hollers back, “Is it a raccoon?!!!!”

“YES!!!!!!!” shouts Claire.

Maya, in the lead on Velvet, responding to the subject, not the game, says, in what is, for her, an unusually clear and penetrating voice, “Victoria, you’ve got to remember to bring your arrows into the tent tonight!”

Besides the arrows, they collect shoes and rocks and set up Claire’s iphone to blast loud music if necessary.

They were not so prepared the previous night.

Because of Chavali’s displaced patella, the horse camping trip was delayed for a day.  Claire had said, “But if you’ve got the camp reserved already, can’t we take Stoney and Cowgirl up the first night and we can at least camp there?  And that is just what we did.  Claire and Maya and Victoria had unpacked the trailer, set up the tent, packed away the food, cooked dinner, made the camp fire and did all of it while running, leaping or jumping and babbling and yacking back and forth to each other the entire time.  My presence only served the purpose of answering questions like “Where are the matches?”  I was also, I assume, useful in the function of being the person who could actually drive the trailer.

The girls set up the tent right next to the two paddocks where Stoney and Cowgirl were housed.  I momentarily considered setting up the other tent next to them, but knew I’d get no sleep.  Instead I pulled the trailer alongside the tent, figuring I could sleep in the trailer tack room loft and be near enough to know if there was any trouble.

The girls had not been thorough in attending to all the unpacking details and had left a couple of duffles and one IKEA bag scattered around the entrance to the trailer tack room.  As I was dozing off, I heard the characteristic shuffling and scratching of the nightly invasion of hungry raccoons as they examined the bags for signs of food.  I called to the girls out the window to tell them about the raccoons, but they were too busy yacking and giggling to hear me.

At one in the morning, I was too sound asleep to hear them.  Their call awakened me from the deepest sleep.  Not sure if it was a dream or if I’d even heard anything in the first place, I looked out the window.  The tent was still; no noise or disturbance of any kind in or around it.

Fifteen minutes later, having only dozed off, I was awakened by the wobbling beams of flashlights outside the window.  The girls were making noise, wiggling the tent, waving the lights; it looked like a space ship trying to take off.

“Claire, Maya, Victoria!”

“Deborah!!! It snarled! It was making noises!  It tried to get in the tent! We need to come sleep in the trailer!!!!!!!”

Apparently two raccoons had decided to mix it up right outside their tent.  After calling out for me and scaring them off, they decided that they should just stay still and quiet as possible and had spent ten minutes hugging each other, trembling in terror, every little sound; a deer jumping through the brush, Stoney drinking water, Cowgirl rubbing her butt on the pipe rail fencing; renewed and fed their fear.  Claire finally figured she could use her cell phone to call her mom who told them to make noise and turn on the lights.

We spread out a tarp over the shavings and manure and the girls gratefully laid their sleeping bags down on top and fell fast asleep.

On the evening of the next day, after our ride. after the horses were fed and watered and the paddocks cleaned and it was time to start making dinner, I couldn’t find the bowls.

“Does anyone know where the bowls are?”

Maya, who had just sat down in front of the tent, unzips the front flap, pulls out a bowl and says, “They’re in here; for banging pots and pans.” To this, Claire adds, “Oh, and can we have the skillet?”

At the request of the ranger, we’d moved the tent to the proper camp ground.  At the request of the girls, I’d moved my sleeping mat and bag out in front of the tent. Going to sleep I heard Maya say, “I feel much better with Deborah sleeping out there.  Gosh, I was soooo scared!”

There were a few raccoon prints on the camp chairs and the trash can in site one had been over turned, but none of the drama of the night before.  Victoria was down right disappointed that she didn’t get to use her arrows.

Although the girls will never forget the snarling raccoon; the verified the sound by searching for snarling raccoon videos on youtube; the rest of our wildlife encounters were limited to deer, coyote and turkeys.  The rest of the days consisted of leaping creeks, fording rivers, galloping up trails that zigzagged through redwood forests and playing pass the branch, the other favorite trail ride past time, that involved tossing objects from rider to rider.  Despite the raccoons, they’d spend the entire summer at the camp, given the chance.

Mouse Wars

“Ahhh!  Ahhh! Did you see that?!  Did you see it’s ugly, brown little tail?!”  Haley is on tip toes, hands by her face, with her nose scrunched up. “They’re evil!  You need to bring a snake in here to eat it!”  Haley would chose a snake over a mouse any day, but mice is what we have.

My rodent control strategy is to not have anything around the barn they like to eat; no grain, no sugar, no snacks.  The only rodent tempting consumable is the rice bran.  It’s kept in a small, metal trash can with a well fitting lid.  But even the best fitting lids, sometimes get left ajar.  A Jar  it was one morning when I found the lid loose and upon lifting it, revealed the surface of the rice bran, normally a sahara dessert in miniature, patted flat by what must have been hours of movement on the part of a quartet of tiny, rodent feet.  Sure enough, through the upside down, semi-opaque, half measuring cup, there was a small, dark mass, which I soon found to be very much alive.

The rice bran trash can is now held shut by a bungee cord, but once a rodent has found a food source, they will die before they give it up.

“There is mouse poop on the white cabinet and on the bookshelf!  There is mouse poop on the ledge above the white board!  That rodent needs to die!” Pronounced Haley, written in capital letters on said white board for all to see.  Unfortunately for Haley, I think Jan, our landlady has decided that the interloper is a welcome guest.  Jan commented on how she sometimes opens the door to find the mouse nibbling at the leftover’s on the spoon she uses to mix the morning pellet and bran mash.  The mouse has made a nest in the back corner behind the hay.  It has gotten bolder and bolder as it’s come to realize it’s in no danger of being caught by a cat.  One of these mornings I expect to find it sitting on the edge of the bookshelf, cleaning it’s whiskers.

Haley is alone in her loathing of mice.  Squeals of joy burst from the hay room on a regular basis as stories of sightings of scurrying feet, noses and tails are carried back out on bouncing nine or ten year-old human feet.  I showed up one morning to a bag of hay pellet torn open by the ponies, half eaten and spread about the aisle in front of the hay room.  It had been left to Victoria and Amy; thirteen and fifteen; to carry the pellet from the driveway into the proper bin in the hay room.  They had succeeded at getting the pellet half way to the hay room, but got distracted mid-task by the appearance of our small guest and spent their remaining time at the barn trying to lure it out of it’s nest rather than finish the assigned chores.

Haley is in her junior year at a very competitive high school.  She is a dedicated student.  In other words, we don’t normally see very much of her.  She feeds on Sunday’s, but often does just the bare minimum for lack of time.  I had texted her about her plans for spring break.  She didn’t respond.  What she did instead, was show up at the barn, dead set on doing some spring cleaning; first and foremost being the task of ridding the barn of every last little rat dropping, but also taking care of all other barn chores, including cleaning and refilling the water tubs.  Sure enough, in one of the tubs was a drowned mouse. (Finding a dead rodent in a water tub or trough at a barn is not uncommon.) According to her mother, Haley screamed hysterically.  She left a vitriolic note on the white board and laid the dead mouse very carefully on the ledge next to the barn aisle for all to see.

Unless they have gotten into a food supply, I hardly notice mice, living or dead.  Not so Rachel and Meera.  Rachel, age ten as of the first of this month, was particularly fond of the mouse.  Even though it was almost perfectly camouflaged with the wood it had been laid out on, Rachel spotted the wet, lifeless body from ten feet away.  Meera, also age ten, was quick to follow.  Rachel was sad and went to console herself with brushing horses. Meera’s curiosity got the better of her. “How did it die?  What should we do with it? Can I pick it up?”  My first thought was, “try feeding it to Dante”, but a better idea quickly took over.  ”Why don’t you give it a burial?”  At that she did.  In a split second or two, Meera had extracted a pair of latex gloves from the medical kit and a shovel from the grooming caddy.  Off to the orchard she headed, shovel in one hand, dead mouse in the other.

Meera returned about then minutes later.  ”I found a rock and I scratched in it, ‘here lies mousy, RIP.’ ”  Probably the only mouse in creation to ever be given it’s own headstone.