Yesterday Peg received a call from our friend Mike, whose cattle have been boarding in our pastures for the last several months. Mike was a little agitated to arrive at Wyldswood and find some of our bovine guests wandering around on Golf Course Road. It seems that someone had left not one, but two gates open, allowing them to wander free and perhaps set the stage for a dangerous encounter for someone driving along that road in the wee hours.
The particular gates that had been left open ruled out one of us, or the nice young men who are taking care of the chickens, as the culprits. The gate at Golf Course Road is fully three-quarters of a mile from the house, and had been secured for as long as we've been back. Most folks don't even know it's there, hidden in the tangled back forty of the farm.
From there, they would have had to come up several hundred yards of unpaved path, then across the newly bush-hogged field to the gate that opens into the pasture Mike just recently cleared and opened to the cattle.
In short, it most likely was someone who knew the property well enough to find a gate hidden in a virtual jungle, then traverse a half mile of woods and fields to open a second gate and release Mike's cows.
This is all a little worrisome for us. Who could've done that, and why?
Our first thought was maybe it was Dustin the coyote hunter. He called as we were leaving town for work, and said he planned to hunt the property that night for the elusive black coyote that has menaced our fowl in the past. But when we contacted him, he replied that he'd called off the hunt because it was too windy.
Perhaps the trailer people who live along our northern boundary? These folks are not Rotarians--one has a sticker sort of like this one, which covers the entire back window of his four wheel drive truck:
His mama must be so proud, assuming she's out on parole and can see his attempt at self-expression.
These people have no grass around their single-wides, because of the packs of dogs they keep penned on the property. The smell on a hot day can be overpowering. Once cur is always chained in the corner of the yard, silently growling whenever I drive past, evoking my favorite cartoon of the indie newspaper scene in LA in the '80s, the Angriest Dog in the World:
Yep, that's pretty much him.
They also have a chicken pen about the size of ours, but with maybe twenty prisoners who are never released, unlike our four who wander the property all day.
Guns are an important part of their lives, apparently. The shooting could shatter a peaceful Sunday morning, or set us on edge at night when we know they've been "drinkin' the drink," as they say around here. Peg had a neighbor with a bulldozer build a berm along that lot line for the express purpose of shielding Wyldswood from the hail of bullets we'd otherwise be forced to dodge when they blow a month's worth of unlicensed pharmaceutical sales proceeds on ammunition.
Why would they be suspects? We know they've visited before to poach after hours, leaving deer entrails and hooves and Natty Light cans in their wake. Deer season started last week. Night time spotlight hunting is completely illegal, but so is poaching in general.
The problem with this theory is that they would have had to drive a couple miles around several other properties to get to the Golf Course Road gate, and there would be no reason to do so because we left open the gate next to their archipelago of rusty trailers.
It is all rather unnerving. We will spend a piece of today shopping for cameras and motion sensors to position around Wyldswood. When we get home, we will double-check the loads in the guns we keep around for protection. Alternating slug and buckshot is best for an encounter in the dark. Whoever's taken to visiting us at night, we are too far in the boonies to call 911 and hope for the best. We'll be ready to take care of ourselves. In the meantime, we'll also be buying new locks for those gates.
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