s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

We have girls !

Princess Cariboo and her Queen Mum arrived, none too pleased, on a horse transport this morning. The truck couldn’t get over the bridge, so the second thing Stephen had to do (after helping the driver *carry* the kushed Victoria out of the truck) was track down a neighbor with plywood to put over the cattle grid on the bridge (getting the girls to cross the stream was Not Going to Happen).

This was followed by a merry chase up and down the driveway and around the sideyard by the kennels, in an attempt to shoo them into the dog run. (Soon, oh, soon, we will jackhammer down those wretched kennels, and assemble in their place a proper shed and yards.) They ended up with Victoria in the dog run, and Cariboo outside the fence, confined into a small area in front of the gate by a bit of electric tape (not electrified. If I ever say “electric tape” in a description of our place, you can assume it’s not actually hooked up to any electricity, unless I indicate otherwise. The white tape is very visible, however, and most critters who’ve ever encountered the stuff live tend to respect it even if it’s not).

That’s where they stayed until I got home, many hours later. There was much sniffing carried out between the girls and the boys over and through the various barriers, but none of the clucking and posturing we saw when Jim arrived. Cariboo and Victoria show all the signs of never having been separated in their lives, keeping close to each other on each side of the dog fence (Stephen tried to get Cariboo in there with her mother, but it never came off).

When I got home, I changed into farm clothes, and then spent the next hour trying to get the halter off Victoria. Stephen had got in *on* her while she was kushed in the truck, but it proved more hindrance than help, and she’d apparently been trained to respond to a tug on the lead rope by jerking it out of your hands and taking off in the opposite direction. Poor Jake Webb got a rope burn trying to hang onto her.

We had her in the dog run, and I got hold of the rope, which was long enough that if she made a break for it, she ran out of pen before she ran out of rope. We’d decided to go the patience route, instead of the pair of us just wrestling her down, and I feel we made the right decision. She’s actually much calmer about being handled than our boys are, ironically. She had no problem with me stroking her neck, massaging her sides, draping a arm across her shoulders. It took a good while and a lot of repetition before she’d let me up by her head, and then she’d move away again when I touched the halter itself (which had become all skewed sideways by this point, which can’t have been helping). Finally, though, we got it off her, with really a minimum of trauma.

Once that was taken care of, we could let them all in to meet each other for real at last. We waited until Yvonne and Joanne left, so there’d be a minimum of distractions (apart from the ever-present Rasputin, anyway), and opened the gate. The boys at first just ran out, thinking we’d be taking them on another adventure down the driveway, but once they figured out that wasn’t the case, the whole mob shifted back into the paddock. I gently shooed Victoria out of the dog run, so she could reunite with her daughter at last.

All together, there was much sniffing of butts (“Oooh! Girls!“), but not much in the way of dominance behavior yet. Unless you count Cariboo getting tetchy about Pointer sticking his nose in her tail one too many times. I think the funniest was Jim, who kept looking at me. After a day of hanging out by the fence, waiting for the other shoe to drop, they seemed happy to just tuck into the long grass and stuff their faces a bit.