Poor thing. She just hates everyone and everything right now. I’m trying to coddle her as much as I can, to not add to her stress. The current theory with what killed Mary is an overrun of a common bacteria that lives in their respiratory tract, and that can be caused by stress. The vet wants me to put Misty on two doses of penicillin every day.
That would assume I can catch her. She escaped yesterday when we were putting the sheep into the back pasture. She just jumped the fence. She’s done that before, but usually, she jumps back in when she sees where I put the sheep, but not this time. Damn it. I didn’t chase her or anything, though, figuring she would just hang out near them, as she has done before.
She did that for a little while. But then we moved the pigs out from the little enclosure where they kept escaping into the pens where the sheep had been. That seems to have been the last straw for Ms. Misty, who hates the pigs with an unholy passion. (Why?!) The chickens and the horses don’t seem to care at all, nor the sheep, but Misty gives her alarm call at them, over and over.
She disappeared all day. I periodically tried to look for her, figuring she was near the house. I heard her a couple of times in the morning, but not for the afternoon at all, so I started to worry that she’d headed back to where we found her the other day. After talking to Valerie, though, I decided to take the horses for a walk into the woods, a first for them, to see if we could see her up the trail. Sure enough, there she was. She wouldn’t let me get very close, but she saw us. I just spoke to her for a while, and then turned the horses back, making sure she saw the way home. The horses weren’t quite ready to go back, but we’ll take them for a longer walk this weekend.
This morning, she was browsing near the sheep. I got her to eat some grain from the Red Scoop of Joy, but didn’t try to catch her. I’m trying to get her calm again. She followed me around the back of the house, watched me bottle feed the baby. But then she caught sight of her reflection in the back sliding glass door, and has been sitting there, keening to it, ever since. She thinks she found her sister, poor thing.
I’m not sure what else to do for her.
Update: We let her hang out by the back door, where she could see the sheep, all day. When I went back to turn on the water to do the evening chores, there she was, in with the sheep, like nothing is the matter. Maybe I do know something about llama psychology after all. She still hates the pigs, though. We heard her danger call all afternoon.
I’m starting to agree with her, though. We moved the pigs into the old sheep pens to keep them from getting out so much, but four of them got out this evening anyway. Damn it. We have plugged holes and plugged holes … why didn’t the lambs find them? We got them all back, except one, and they had no interest in following the Red Scoop of Joy, at all. They much preferred to root around under the trailer, and all the chickens agreed — they got a crowd in nothing flat. So in an attempt to understand piggy psychology, I’m letting the last one miss his buds for a bit, and maybe catch our breath before we go out there to get him in.
In other news, we sifted the prettiest compost in all the world this afternoon, and then topped off the raised bed with it. It’s amazing what the bins did being ignored for two years. No turning, no attention, no nothing, and it is completely finished black gold. Even the worms had left. I’ve got six bins just like it, which might actually be enough for the first time in my life.
We also started another raised bed, using 6 x 6 pieces of lumber that we had laying around hither and yon. If we get it even vaguely finished and loaded up with something, I want to at least plant potatoes in it this year. Then, we have to have at least one more by next spring, because I’m putting tomatoes in my first raised bed, so with the need to not follow with the same veggies each year, we need a spare, at least.
In the wild critter department, I think I saw ten snakes at least today, and didn’t even scream like a girl, like I usually do. I even tried to take a picture of one, but it came out really blurry. I saw a painted turtle and a leopard frog, too.
Oh yeah. We found 15 eggs in the hay house, way up high, in the back. For now, I’m going to let them keep laying there, because this way at least I know where the eggs are. I’m hoping to find some apple baskets and put them in the coop. That’s what they had in their previous home, and maybe they’ll like them here. I was going to have to break down and buy eggs, which was really irritating me, so I started following chickens around like a detective for a while.
