Living so close to Mother Nature at times can be very hard and the last few weeks are no exception. We have lost two female ducks to the fox, well we say that as they just vanished into thin air. Not a feather nothing left but an empty space.
Our dogs have been a real trial, in particular Patch (the father) together with Katie and Spot (the two puppies I decided to keep). They like to go walkabouts which the last time lasted for Patch and Spot five days. But for Katie the sweetest little dog you will ever meet it was over ten days.
In all that time I just knew that she would be returned back to me. Which she was, she had been handed into the animal sanctuary at Decimo some twenty miles down the valley. The sanctuary is for old and abandoned dogs every credit to the two ladies who work there, no animal is every put down they stay there right until the end of their lives, where they are loved and well cared for. I even ended up volunteering to work one day a month for them.
Katie being young had that day been re-housed and the lady was mortified when we contacted the centre and I really know how she felt, but Katie was Richard’s dog and although I am very attached to all of my animals Richard has never been emotionally attached to any of them, that was until now. So she had to come home even thought it was at a cost of 200 Euros.
Still I licked my wounds, it was worth it to have her home where she belonged but we knew that we would have to manage them in a different way. Now when we go out they have a huge pen where they stay with both shelter and water they are now safe. Patch and the puppies can never be out at the same time so with five dogs, at least two of them are in the pen at any given time, whilst the others are free to roam and be part of the family. It’s working really well apart from twice when they were so determined to get out they tunneled under the fence. Talk about escape from Colditz!
Then my beautiful Cockerel had flown into the dog pen, they just thought he was a toy to play with. He was barely alive when I found him and died that night I guess from shock, his injuries didn’t seem that bad. It really is a tough life.
Then we have Coco the Shetland pony whom I have just nicknamed “Houdini”. He has been amazing all winter, settling into a routine at Sensone and causing us no bother. He is so good with the small children that I take him down to San Pietro in Campo on the 6th January each year for the Befana celebrations. Where not only does he and I walk from Sensone to San Pietro in Campo, we then spend the whole day in “giro”, stopping at each house to sing the Befana song whilst giving the local children a pony ride between houses, all before walking back to Sensone.
Every other Sunday afternoon throughout the summer he can be found at our local bar Il Mostrico at Renaio, where again he gives all of the local children pony rides, we walk from the bar to the church and back. He is so good and he loves his time with the children. We even have him helping us to pull the wood from the forest in those more difficult to reach places. So he really can be a joy to have around, well most of the time anyway.
But and this really is a big BUT, being a little stallion at certain times of the year, this time of the year, he turns into Houdini. This is the time of year when the female horses come into season and he seems to know even though we are miles away from anywhere. Last year he was found at Tiglio, ensconced in a new relationship with his latest girlfriend.
This time he had found his way to Barga where we keep our other horses. Anyone who thinks animals have short memories, think again he hadn’t been with the other horses for well over a year, and he had the landslide at Piazza Grande to deal with, although we believe that he took another way down. As soon as we had known he’d escaped, we immediately track his trail by looking for his poo – there was nothing. So we don’t know for sure how he got there but we think he went straight down through the forest.
That evening when I visited the other horses he was there, all three of them calm and tranquil inside the shed. I decided as Richard wasn’t with me that I would leave him there, one night wouldn’t be a problem he seemed quite settled, I would get him the next day and walk him home.
Due to work commitments it was mid afternoon before we reached the field, I had joked to Richard and said “I hope he’s behaved and they all hadn’t broken out of the field”. Me and my big mouth.
As soon as we reached the field the mare and the pony came running up from the side of the field, but there was no sign of Shane. Now you can’t miss Shane he is 17.1 hands and a huge hunk of a horse. It was unusual for the mare and him to be separated. We searched the forest, we drove through Barga, went down to Loppia and Richard walked up through the pathway from Loppia to the horses field.
We called his name, we followed their footsteps, but it was really strange he had vanished into thin air. It looked like they were together for a while and then there were dog footprints mixed in with theirs and I think this is where they might have been forced to separate but I didn’t know for sure. The forest was silent which is unusual because normally when they are out of each others sight, they would call for each other.
The mare and the pony were very hot and sweating, they had obviously been running about for quite awhile. We locked them into the shed to keep them safe, luckily for us the first cutting of hay was in the barn so we had some food to give to them and it would keep them calm.
We searched for Shane until it was dark, it was now too dangerous for us to be walking the steep slopes so at 10.30pm we had no option but to abandon the search to leave him hoping that he was ok and that he would turn up.
I didn’t sleep much that night, I meditated and covered him with love and light, I thought he had probably slipped in the forest, he isn’t as agile as the other two but I just hoped that he would find his way back to the field.
We got up early to carry on the search, we called our friend Massimo just incase he had heard anything, nothing. Thankfully the next phone call was Gian Luca the local vet, Shane had been found, he was stopping the traffic on the old bridge just outside of Barga.
As I neared Barga in the car, I could see the traffic and the police. It was now only 10am but I knew that he would be stressed with the heat, the sun and the flies. A lovely young man had caught him and as I neared him my heart went out to him. He had a nasty cut to his eye and some nasty cuts on his side, he was tired and very stressed but he was so pleased to see me.
Even though he could not see out of the bad eye, the cut was nasty with skin, blood and puss oozing from his swollen eye. We took a very slow walk back to the field but I knew he was going to be alright as we had to stop every few minutes so that he could take a mouthful of grass.
Richard had called the vet and waited in the field whilst I started the long walk back to Sensone with the pony, he couldn’t stay with them. By now we were in the full heat of the day, it was hard going. The pony didn’t want to come it was as if he knew, he called for the others until we reached the Tiglio turning and then gave up.
As we passed the houses, people would come out with their children, they would call him beautiful and I under my breath would be calling him “bastardo”. We must have been walking for at least two hours when we reach Pegnanna, I was exhausted and so was he, so we stopped for a while and Richard came along in the car.
We tried to get him to walk alongside the car but we couldn’t keep it ticking over slow enough for the pony so Richard decided to go home and change the car to the Jeep it had a much slower tick over. It was such a relief when he came back, and he’d also brought a bottle of water which both I and the pony enjoyed. This worked most of the rest of the way home, until the pony put his breaks on. He wasn’t going to go any further, well not unless I walked with him.
By the time we reached Diana’s house we both were exhausted and bless her she had lunch prepared for me whilst Sergio watered the pony and we tied him to his favorite tree. I stayed with Diana for at least three hours giving us both time to recover before we finished our final walk home.
Thankfully Shane was going to be alright. He’s on another course of antibiotics and painkillers. He might even need a stitch to the eye. But all in all a very good end to an unusually stressful couple of days.
Coco is now safe in the shed on our land, where he will stay for a few days whilst we repair the fence he had broken down and give him some time to reflect on his little adventure.
For us it was just another experience of living here at Sensone.
Article by Sensone – all of the Sensone Diaries can be seen here