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By BONNIE PRICE LOFTON
Rappahannock New* Contributing Writer
It seemed like a good idea at the time: Uncle Buck’s pasture had been grazed clean, while the adjoining acres around my parents’ house needed mowing desperately. Why not move Uncle Buck’s horses to the yard to do a little trimming for us?
Mom was skeptical. The old locust fence around her house was falling down, and what about her flower beds?
“We’ll watch the horses from the porch,” I chirped. “But I’m sure they’ll stick to your grass. It’s so thick and lush—why would they want to be anywhere else?”
The seven horses—four mares, one gelding and two fillies— played their parts perfectly for the first 45 minutes or so. They tackled my parents’ lawn with gusto, munching as if they hadn’t seen fresh grass in years.
By and by, I went inside to make dinner while Mom headed to a playset to entertain my two young children. I had just put some potatoes in boiling water when I heard Mom yell: “The horses are gone! Somebody left the driveway gate open.”
That somebody was me. I had carefully shifted the horses into my parents’ yard, closed the gate, and then belatedly decided to drive to my uncle’s bam for something or other. On that last trip, I hadn’t closed the gate. Force of habit. It’s simply a gate that almost always stands open.
I jumped in Dad’s old pick-up and thundered 100 yards down the rutted driveway to Route 522.
Nothing. No horses in the woods fronting the highway or in the grass across the way. What a relief! The horses must have headed the opposite direction, through a back gate leading to Bessie Bell mountain.
I spun Dad’s pick-up around and came face-to-face with a friend, Kim Bonser, in his pick-up. “Your horses are ip Woodville,” Mr. Bonser said grimly.
He took the lead, and we raced north on 522, passing two mature women standing incongruously at the edge of the highway. I recognized Mildred and Irene Timbers, our closest neighbors, pointing towards Woodville. i
Later, I learned that one of these sisters had been driving south on 522 when our seven horses appeared on the crest of a hill just before her driveway. They stampeded by her car, urged on by a white truck with a honking
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