Bee Gees Us

Wednesday March 12 2008 The house is now full of boxes of food, the fridge is stuffed... Connie is back for a couple of weeks of riding! I was taking the dogs for their evening walk and we were halfway up our little Tevis trail when we heard her arrive. We turned around and went back to see her and Zico - they were already visiting with the horse herd who'd come up from somewhere - Finneas must have heard Connie's voice. Connie didn't even recognize her beloved Finneas at first - he's now brown (between coats) and not so chunky. It wasn't until she checked out his back leg owie that she'd read so much about that she knew it must be him, and when he started kissing her on the lips (begging for carrots) she knew it was definitely him. We unloaded her truck - boxes and ice chests of food - the fridge is stuffed to the gills - and tubs of clothes and Sun magazines (hmmm... maybe she is moving in), and then, since she and Zico had been in the car for 9 hours, we took all four dogs on a walk. Up Pickett Creek as it got dark, we caught up on things and talked horses and cougars - like the old cougar poo in the yard, the possible cougar kill (a deer) up the creek in December. It was a nice night - cool, no breeze, and a sliver of a moon just making it light enough to see that we were following the road. As we neared the entrance to the canyon 1 1/2 miles down, we were yakking away - the cougar thoughts still in the air - it happened very rapidly - we suddenly heard this Big Thing right behind us, and as we wheeled around this Huge Black Thing was right on top of us, and the adrenaline shot down my legs and up my spine and made my scalp prickle and we both screamed! It was the whole horse herd, scaring the Bee Gees Us out of us, having run up behind us - soundless on the sandy road, Finneas - looking very black in the dark - in the lead. AHHHHH! The horses stopped short because we scared them with our screaming, Finneas looking rather mortified, not sure if he'd done something bad - he usually gets kisses and hugs when he comes up, not screams. After we recovered our senses, but with legs still shaking from the adrenaline rush, we petted them all, and turned around to go back - continuously glancing back over our shoulders. There COULD be cougars out here, you know.

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