While all this was going on, I was also dealing with the fencing around my shed and on the road frontage, which I hadn’t been able to give much attention to for years. If I was going to start using my facilities again, the place needed to be as watertight as possible all round.
Most of my road frontage near the shed is a steep bank covered in shrubs that drops down to the highway. The fence is an old sheep netting fence put in by my father, with 2 rows of barbed wire on the top – but it is deteriorating a bit in places. I was pretty sure the goats got out there on occasions and whenever they did, it was only a matter of them taking a leisurely walk of less than half an hour round my boundary to be back in the bush again.
The first thing to be fixed was the mysteriously rotted-off tie-down post on the shed side of the lower paddock. I drove a waratah down beside that, hooking the top of the post under the top lip of the standard, and wiring the fence and post to it in several places. It pulled the wires back down nicely, and felt good and secure. I reminded myself to add a second waratah when I had one to spare.
The Big Shed
Next came the internal fences around my shed, some of which had never been fully completed. One length of fence needed a capping rail and some repair work on the netting. I didn’t have any proper capping rail, but I had some long lengths of 1″x1″ which I’d bought for another project and never used, so I put them up to serve in the meantime and tidied up the netting on that fence. There was one part of it where the goats had been able to jump over for years – that was not going to happen any more either.
When I got round to the road fence I found a nice big hole I didn’t know about – aaaah! That explained a lot. No wonder Moz seemed to appear and disappear like a ghost sometimes.
Hadn’t I mended that one before? If so, the hole was as large as life and needed to be fixed again. I can remember one time a couple of years ago getting that very eerie feeling of being watched while I was doing something in the kitchen garden. I had looked up to find Moz standing there outside the fence, still and silent under the bushes, looking at me from beneath those curls.
Mozilla
And that explained why I’d noticed Rheema, several times since she came home, standing looking across in that direction from the paddock they were in. When I saw her doing that, I had a feeling she might be thinking about an escape route, and sure enough – there it was.
It was not till the afternoon that I figured the outcome of the buck fight. I heard some calls coming from the top paddock and could see The Pretender up near the bushline. Was he the sole survivor, I wondered? Was Moz lying exhausted somewhere? Or worse? I had walked up and down that hill so many times in recent days that I didn’t feel like going up again to investigate – and I had work to get on with. Late in the afternoon, it all became clear.
Moz had given his son a trouncing, and The Pretender was now on the outer, while Moz retained posession of lower portion of the paddock and the fenceline boundary between the two of them and the does. Though Mozilla’s days were numbered too, I was glad he had retained his sovereignty and that his guts and fighting skill had kept him on top. So far at least – would this be the final outcome, or would there be a war of attrition?
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