Webmaster’s note: The format of this column includes all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! Phil writes this month’s column.
Meeting the Neighbors
You never know what your neighbor is up to.
Maine sports a lot of driveways that head off into the woods. Some for quite a distance, but even a small patch of woods disguises what lies beyond the driveway entry.
At Quill’s End, most of what we do is visible from the road, and more so when the critters are above our farm in our neighbor’s field. For most of the abbreviated grazing season, the draft horses have been up in that field. Folks have grown accustomed to seeing them there and now associate these fairly new additions with the farm.
If you have ever heard a knocking on your front door at odd hours of the night, you have your own special fears of what it could mean. If your children are out and about, a 1:30 am banging on your door puts your heart in a place where it should not dwell. If you happen to own livestock, well…it is hard to describe.
Friday night brought a rare occurrence when Benjamin was away in Vermont for meetings (ironically a board retreat for the Draft Animal Power Network) and Carolyn was away contra dancing, staying at a friend’s overnight. It also brought the rare occurrence of a 1:30 am knocking on our door for animals in the road.
I’d like to say that we are inexperienced in this regard, but I’d be lying. In our defense, though, it has not always been our animals in the road. Sometimes, wildlife in the road has warranted a late-night passerby to call the sheriff to get us out of bed. Yet, as the most visible livestock-owning farm, it just stands to reason that our door gets a knock. If the animals don’t belong to us, we are often expected to know whose they are. It is also noteworthy to mention that humans don’t see that well in the dark, or perhaps we see what we expect we should see.
After answering the door, Heather and I bundled up to head outdoors. The woman knocking said our horses were out, running down the highway. The temperature that night was in the mid-teens, and the cool night came with an amazing, clear sky that was punctured only by the headlamps we were wearing. We bundled up because we knew that we might be out awhile.
A man met me in the driveway after I turned the barn lights on and mentioned that he saw the horses go above the barn. I told him that was where I was headed as the horse’s paddock includes a portion of the barn and a fenced “yard” behind the barn.
I counted all three Quill’s End horses in their paddock and walked the fence line which was intact. A second man came out of our field saying he just saw the two runaway horses in the field.
Oh! The mystery was on. Glad our draft horses were all accounted for and had not been gallivanting, we listened to the description of the two horses that were on the loose. Spitting images of the Belgians, we were told. We ran down the list of draft horses in the surrounding area. Newly acquainted with these neighbors of ours, they immediately started calling other neighboring horse owners to find out who was missing two horses. And off they went into the dark night, game for the adventure they’d encountered, the third in their party keeping the horses in sight and in phone contact from the lower fields.
Heather and I headed indoors to gather our wits, expecting that the end of our involvement had not yet arrived. The next phone call was from the sheriff. The sheriff’s office apparently has our phone number on file for “loose critters.” They definitely should. I don’t particularly like it, but they should. Sheriff’s deputies are not trained in the breed characteristics of horses. They also are not very good-humored at that particular hour when asked if they are, I found out.
Since horses were on the loose and in our general vicinity, and frankly, not much else was going on at 1:45 am, I got bundled up again, grabbed a couple of halters, and headed down the road. The two gentlemen had already caught one horse. I parked my truck in a driveway and put a halter on this cunning saddle horse. She might go 15 hands and 900 pounds (a good deal smaller and quite different looking than our draft horses). The other one was soon apprehended as well, and you know what? I did know just where they belonged. No one would ever guess because they live half a mile down our neighbor’s driveway into the woods.
Heather and Phil Retberg and their three children run Quill’s End Farm, a 105-acre property in Penobscot that they bought in 2004. They use rotational grazing on their fifteen open acres and are renovating thirty more acres from woods to pasture to increase grazing for their pigs, grass-fed cattle, lambs, laying hens, and goats. Heather is Vice President of Halcyon Grange #345 and writes a newsletter for their farm’s buying club of farmers in her area and has generously permitted us to share some of their columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.