It started on Thursday. I got a call from Mower saying that Elmo was out. At that time Mower couldn't catch him so I left work (in the middle of a busy deadline, I might add) to go round him up and see what the problem was.
As soon as I pulled up, Elmo ran straight up to me and wanted a scritch on the forehead. So I threw a piece of twine around his neck and put him back in the pasture. By that time Mower was hiking back up the hill. Apparently the elk had been through and had knocked down a good portion of the fence but he had strung it back up. But because it was draping along a lot of foliage it wasn't hot. I didn't really worry about that at that time... I figured it would be good enough to hold him until the weekend when I could really get it fixed up again.
Guess I was wrong. Because the fence wasn't hot he would just duck under the top strand and step over the bottom strand and help himself to the grass, the neighbors garden (they weren't too excited about a 1,000 pound horse munching on their garden goodies) and the other neighbors flowers. He was quickly becoming equina non grata. And I kept getting calls from Mower about him going walk-about.
Unfortunately the solar charger wasn't getting enough sun but there wasn't a power supply down to the hot fence to put an electric charger on there. I told mower until we got power down there, there wasn't much I was going to be able to do...
On Saturday when I arrived to begin fence fixage Elmo was, once again, out. Of course. Why stay in a pasture with no grass when you can just let yourself out and eat to your heart's content? Grrrrr....
Anywho, I just left him to graze and started taking the fence down and restringing it. The previous time when I had looked, it only seemed that the top portion up around the barn needed to be dealt with. Wrong. The whole thing was in shambles (grumble, grumble, damn elk, grumble). So I took both strands down and began to restring the whole fence... which consists of stringing it along a very steep hillside as well.
Damn. That's steep...
How steep? Well, it's "I'm hanging onto a tree for dear life" steep...
The top strand went up just fine and without incident. We cut away any foliage touching the strand and then plugged it in. Then I put Elmo back in the pasture.
I then proceeded to put up the bottom strand (which isn't hot) and that was going pretty well until I started down the hillside again. At that point Noelle, who was tearing up and down the hillside with Daisy, ran into me and I lost my footing and slipped and fell and proceeded to slide about 20 feet down the hill... getting mud into places it ought not to be. Like down my pants. Up my shirt. In my hair. In my shoes (I was only wearing my rubber Crocks). In my teeth (don't ask, 'cause I'm not sure). And when Mower caught site of me he laughed. I gave him the stink-eye.
I also learned a very important lesson on that slide down the hill... which is: if you are going to grab onto the fence to help arrest your fall, it is much wiser to grab the non-hot strand. I, unfortunately, grabbed the top strand. It hurt. A lot. That sucker was HOT.
Good news was that I was sure it was getting plenty of juice to keep Elmo off of it.
When I got home and got in the shower, the water was a very distasteful color for almost 5 minutes. Getting the dried mud out of my hair wasn't easy and required several shampooings.
For the rest of Saturday and Sunday he stayed put.
When I went out to feed this morning he was out again. Damn this horse is a nuisance.
I put him away again and then proceeded to walk the fence seeing if I could figure out where he was getting out. The hot fence was fine. When I came around the other side of the barn by the far gate I saw this:
Hoofie prints on the wrong side of the gate...
There used to be about a 1 foot gap between the fence and the post of the gate. However, Elmo had apparently used his significant girth to widen the gap so he could get out.
Any gap is an opportunity in Elmo's mind...
Notice the very bent t-post on the right-hand side... and the traumatized tree that got trampled in the process of his escape. Poor thing...
Hopefully this will do the trick...
Man that horse is becoming a serious pain in my ass...
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