Nothing gets a person moving quite as well as a morning phone call from the neighbor. “Hi, your goats are in my yard,” she said. I believe what I said wasn’t quite as polite but I hopped in the truck and went to the neighbor’s to get three of my goats out of her driveway.

Two of the goats in question were among this spring’s kids so they were able to squeeze through a heretofore unusable gap in the fence. The third of the escapees was a young doe. How she got through the hole, I’m not sure but after much chasing and cajoling, she also got back through it to the proper side.

We plugged the noticeable holes on the neighbor side of the pasture and came back home to finish whatever it was I was doing. However, mid-way through whatever it was I was doing, I looked out the window to see my 2 month old buck in the neighbor’s hay field. Crap.

So I grabbed some wire, pliers, beverage and cane, hopped on the quad, and headed across the pasture to do the spring fence checking. A task I apparently should have done last week. It was fairly uneventful on the east and south sides but when I made the turn to check the fence that keeps the little beasties out from under the highway, I ran into a snag.

Because last year we had a terrible time clearing the foliage, branches and other misc gunk out of the field fence, we redid that portion in barbed alone. The reasoning was that goaties don’t like wet feet so they weren’t likely to wade through a deep creek to scoot through the fence and wander onto the road and enough barbed would keep the cows on their side as well.

That theory has thus far proven to be true but since we’re organic we have a bumper crop of watercress which had pulled the lower strand of barbed down into the water leaving quite a sizable escape portal for any inquisitive ruminant to exit. So I took my handy cane and tried to grab the cress and yank it off the fence but it wasn’t working too well. I then used said cane to poke into the creek in an attempt to determine the depth. That’s why I bring the cane actually since I’m pretty ambulatory as a general rule.

I poked and decided that it was shallow enough that my rubber boot clad feet wouldn’t get wet so I stepped into the creek. Step one, step two, step three – stuck. In the mud. Deep mud. However, rather than concern myself with being stuck like a mammoth in a tar pit, I was busy pulling cress off of the fence. I leaned over far enough that I almost lost my balance but the cane prevented me from going face first into the mire. Whew, that was close.

Step four didn’t go as well as one might have hoped. Step four involved yanking step two out of the mud while leaning on the cane and trying to plant my foot further up the fence row. Apparently there are mud creatures in that creek that eat boots and have suction comparable to a black hole because that boot was not coming out. A couple more tugs and it did though.

Sadly I didn’t check the water depth prior to step four and the water was just a tad deeper than the height of my boot so all of my care was for naught. The boot took on water like a sinking ship. It also overbalanced the rest of  the human to which the boot was attached and down I went on my knee in the creek.

However, not one to give up, I continued to pull the watercress off of the fence while my feet slurped and sloshed in the waterproof boots which you’ll note are also waterproof from the inside. I finished my task, slurped back to the quad and headed back to the house where I was greeted by my husband laughing at my mud covered extremities and threatening to post photos on the internet.

So have you checked your fences yet?

Related Posts

1. Spring Means Fencing
2. Stuck Goat
3. Goat Fencing With Cattle Panels
4. Cane Creek Goats
5. Rutting Bucks

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Blog Bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.