We came downstairs this morning to find the Sheriff in the driveway. His Jeep and a few other County vehicles were a few hundred feet from the house, so I immediately assumed that they had come to take me away for my criticisms of Bushitler — you know, that’s happening all over the place — and that they were preparing for a long standoff. They must have heard somewhere about the abundant stocks of canned soup in the basement.

It turns out, though, that they were just trying to recapture a horse that’s on the loose, and that has been on the loose, it appears, for several months now.

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In the woods like this, the cowboys can’t do their thing with the ropes, so I gather the plan is to shoot him with a tranquilizer dart. Unfortunately, the deputies trooping around in our woods — if you can ‘troop’ on ground that’s halfway to vertical — were not successful in driving him into the open where the sleeping-horse trailer could be wheeled up. Because there were only two deputies, the horse was easily able to outflank them and head back up to the fire road at the top of the property, and thence, probably, to the clearing for the power lines and ultimately to anywhere there’s electricity.

Before they went into the woods in the first place, Nicole and I were in the process of telling the deputy about this old road when the woman from animal control came up and told us to go inside and leave everything to the professionals.

Had she not been so quick to assert the Authority Of The State, they probably would have got some information that would have helped them. The deputy who was talking to us was pretty friendly, though. Probably cops are, of necessity, better at dealing with people than are animal control officers.