Midnight In The Garden

Well that was an adventure. I had rolled out of bed in the middle of the night, bumbling and stumbling my way into the kitchen for a glass of water. Just as I was about to quench my thirst, the dogs began barking.

It was frenzied barking, the kind that is very insistent. There was something going on outside. Leaving my water, I began dressing for a midnight romp on the farm. I really did not want to do it. I would have rather drank the cup of water and settled back down in the beckoning bed, but I layered up and headed for the garage.

At the garage I added a couple more layers since we had been having rain showers along with a bright spotting light and farm boots. Out the back door, I began sweeping the beam along the large field at the back of the house where the elk, deer and coyotes like to congregate and irritate the two farm dogs throughout long nights.

The field was empty.

Then I stepped around the front of the house and shown the light into the garden. There under the prune tree was a satiated bull. #105 one of the newly weaned bulls that was supposed to be in the bull pen with his compatriots, was doing his own office work of sorts with the FIFO method. Now for those paper shufflers and inventory managers out there, FIFO stands for First In First Out. In Bull-In-The-Garden speak it is Fruit In Fruit Out. In the precious few minutes, less than 15 in my estimation, from the time the dogs noticed the intruder until I was suited up and waving a flashlight around, #105 had managed to denude the bottom half of the Asian pear tree, knock off most of the perfectly ripe Honeycrisp apples, and end up content snarfling up the dregs of the over-ripe plums that had fallen to the ground. How do I know where he had been? Each spot showed copious amounts of bull piles that I stepped in.

While #105 stood in a fruit stupor under the plum tree, I ran to the house and woke up Mike. It is HIS bull after all, he should be in on the fun of getting him extricated from the garden and back into the bull pen.

During the time Mike was getting dressed the dogs, still on their tethers, were insistently barking that we were not moving the intruder back to his rightful area.

With the two of us showing the path to walk, #105 calmly walked through the strawberry patch across the driveway, around the stock trailer and through an opened electric fence to rejoin his fellow pen mates. Mike checked the electric fence but something was not right. The next hour and a half was spent walking the lines. Mike went around the bull pen and I around the show barn side of the pastures. We found a few issues and corrected them as we went. The fence had a charge but we needed to walk the lines again in the daylight to find the reason the fence was not as ‘hot’ as it should be.

Getting back to bed, pulling the covers up around my chilled flesh, I realized I did not get that needed drink that began this adventure. With daylight only a couple hours away, I refused to worry about my thirst and tried to get back to dreamland.