The Pied Piper of Otisco ... & ... Enjoying the Fruits of our Labors

We have been very busy here this week.  We always process and package our own deer, so that took several days out of the week.  Our big upright freezer is packed!

I was glad to have Eler Beth's help with the packaging, too, because I hurt my back a little over the weekend.  A very dear friend of ours in her 80s (I've written about her before) called to get my help in getting in her daughter's two horses that had gotten out of their pasture and wandered off.  Her daughter was out of town.  She boards her horses on a farm in the country, and the owner of the farm is a man in his 70s, recovering from a recent stroke.  He doesn't live alone but he was at home alone at the time that he discovered the horses had gotten out.

So I drove Jewel out there and we finally managed to locate the two horses, at a neighboring farm.  One of them will follow and one of them will lead, so I managed to get a halter on the leader, Domino, and Red followed along.  A pony, belonging to the old man's grandchildren, had escaped along with the horses, but thankfully she seemed happy to follow along as well.

Now I used to ride a lot when I was younger but haven't done much in years.  I had absolutely nothing to mount Domino from, although I did try to get him to stand close enough to a high bank so I could use it as a mounting block.  No good, I'm afraid.  I tried mounting without any help, but I'm only 5 feet tall and Domino isn't a small horse.  I'm also 41 and not in the kind of shape to be mounting bareback with no one to give me a leg up.  (Although I did give it a try!  And I'm so glad no one was there to see it!)

So I gave up on trying to mount and instead I led him, with my little equine followers for 3.2 miles(!!!yes we drove back to where they were just to measure the miles!!!), down one long gravel drive, down a stretch of county road, and then down another long gravel drive back to their home.  Walking three miles on gravel, holding a lead on a large horse who occasionally gets spooked and jerks his head up is not good on an already bad back.  And it was cold!  While we were on the county road at least 6 vehicles came by.  One driver asked if I needed any help, but the others just looked and drove on.   There was absolutley nothing I could do when a car came by, except stop Domino and hope that Red and the pony would have the sense to stand still or move to the side of the road.  Thankfully all of the drivers were very careful.

I had a nice hot shower when I got home but the next day I was really sore and my lower back went out on me when I picked up a laundry basket!  I'm all better now, though.

Eler Beth has been scraping one of her hides.  She is keeping and tanning all three of them.  I had no idea that if I wanted to have a few hours quiet all I had to do was hand her a deer hide to scrape on a sunny day!  She spent 2-1/2 hours straight working on the buck hide today.

I'd glance out the kitchen window once in a while to see her sitting there working away, one or other of the dogs nearby for company.  She will be using tanning solution, of course, but I figured we could use the experience as a school lesson, so we are learning about how the Native Americans worked hides and what they used them for.  Since she has Cherokee in her ancestry, I figured it would be a good opportunity to learn a lot of things about them as well.  At one point today when I went outside to check on her, she happily told me, "Indian women would have chewed the hide to make it soft, you know."  I said, "Well....okay, ... if you want to....", and she said, "Mom! I'm not going to! "

For her cooking lesson on Wednesday she made homemade venison stew, doing all of it by herself with my instructions.  She washed, peeled, and chopped all of the vegetables, maintaining a steady stream of chatter the whole while.  We had a very, very delicious dinner, I must say!