Cooter Hollow Horrorshow

So I rolled in to my Great Lower Garden on Sunday evening after a week out-of-town on a means-making mission, and pulled up to check on the state of things– the state of tomatoes and peas, I’d thought. Something to note about the Great Lower Garden; mine, while the most outrageous in scale, is not the only garden in these fields. The friend who dwells this land very much likes putting it to broad use, so it houses a few gardens, the pigs, at times there are cows, and at the moment, it’s also home to a gaggle of five horses, if horses in fact come in gaggles. Maybe it’s a flock. Or more accurately, One Male Pony Who Is Very Pleased With His Manhood, and his coterie of female companions of various sizes.

That pony does not discriminate.

In any event, the presence of the horses does the trick of keeping critters out of my garden, and makes it generally a bucolic and pastoral place in which to dig and frolic joyously in the dirt. Imagine pigtails and coveralls, if you want to complete the stereotype. They ninny and do majestic equine things, the horses, and I blubber back while pulling weeds. It’s not a bad way to spend the summer. Last year I fed them carrot tops until the one little prick (big prick) got wise to jumping the electric fence and grazed freely on my greens.

 

But I’m being excursive. And this is supposed to be a horror story.

And so, we returned on Sunday to a crowd of people surrounding a vet, who was busy putting one of the horses back together. It was the white one, the most easily visible at night, and as a retired show-jumper, the slowest of the bunch. She had deep scratch marks from her head down through the haunches, and most of her ladybits ripped up. The vet was cleaning her out and stitching her up, the kids were hanging around agog, and the groups were whispering various legends and anecdotes about Eastern Mountain Lions.

These are legendary chupacabrish mountain lions, which are really just mountain lions but rendered Officially Extinct. Though not really. Really what’s extinct is this eastern sub-species that never really should’ve been classified in the first place. And the official word is that since these are extinct, our area is free of mountain lionish activity. And if you call The Department of Fish and Wildlife and report a sighting, they assure you you’ve had too much ponymash, and that what you saw, or what killed your herd, or what frightened your kids, was nothing but a bobcat. Sometimes a bear. And if you call and tell them your horse has been hysterectomied by a creature whose scratch marks are in line with that of a Big Wild Fucking Cat, you’ll be told that no, it was just an uncharacteristically large and aggressive black bear. And if you tell them that this is not how black bears attack, you might be told something along the lines of Only one of us is a biologist (or somesuch) and be left to whisper to excitedly and feel quite terrible for the poor maimed horse. And if you then have to come home from the garden to your woods at Cooter Hollow, prime habitat of deer (preferred dinner of Mythological Big Cats), and you have to go outside to pee at night, it might give you new cause for forgoing the post-pee shake, might make it okay to let a few drops dribble down the leg.

The horse is going to be okay, or so we think now. She’s in obvious pain, but has energy, and spends her days grazing while using what’s left of her tail (which was cut to help keep her wounds clean) to try and bat away flies. It’s a sad, sad sight around here.

So let’s edit the rest until of the discursive ramblings until just now, today, SNIP, 48 hours later, and I’m working frantically to compensate for the time away in my garden, whose weeds are having a FINE season so far. My constitution is not lacking in uptightedness as I work, wondering if I’m being stalked by a giant fearless people-eater, and the horses aren’t in the back by me, but up near the house, where they’ve been since the Great Mauling. I’d been there a couple of hours when suddenly I hear some squealing the likes of which MUST be an animal under attack in broad daylight. And so, without thinking of anything except playing heroics for this horse, I take my garden hoe and a big sturdy rock, and sprint the 200 meters up the path toward the house. And I’m a distance runner: sprinting is HARD, especially when hot and I’m being attacked by black flies. But here I come, full only on adrenaline and ready to beat a mountain lion to death with a garden implement, when I slow up. It’s my neighbor, boss of the beasts, who’s introducing a new piglet into the barn, and doing so on a halter.

I’ve got blood on my mind and he’s walking a pig on a leash.