Susie's Soundings

Once upon a time, there was a girl who grew up in the city, she ate her meat out of a package that came from Meijer, tomatoes out of her mom’s garden or from the Meijer produce section. She never lived further than 3 miles from a grocery store. Enter knight in shining armor otherwise known as the hunter. The hunter was disguised as a man about town; he dressed the part, lived in the city, loved the finer things in life for instance; the theatre, fine dining restaurants, travel, etc.

Suddenly the hunter exposes his comoflauge and cowboy boots and sweeps the scraped up princess to the mountains of Arizona. The hunter and now mended huntress build a home on the mountain. With their Year and a half project drawing to the end she is outside spraying the porch when she hears her contractor yell, “Susan, you have cows!!” Immediately she thinks, ELK, because the hunter has trained her to the proper cow verses girl elk when referring to the female of the species. With excitement she runs across their newly landscaped yard to find…

not the beautiful female elk she was hoping to find on their land but the gigantic cloven prints of CATTLE across their beautiful vibrant new grass and landscape! The bohemoth divots left in the new turf, turned up infant plants, chewed up and left to dry, and the recently, lovely, flowering crabapple tree now looking more like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree is an on going reminder of midnight visitors.
Even the sandy hill was not left unscathed, they trampled across easily as if flat ground. The Yellow Page ad keeps running through her mind, “Phone First!”

This would be when due diligence would have come in handy. A country girl may have know better. Perhaps a call to the neighborhood association to find out this beautiful mountain side they are building on is FREE RANGE!! Who knew? Evidently the residence of Lazy Y U on the Hualapai Mountain Range knew, the sheriff knew, the builder knew.  The kind ranch owner, was out the next day in search of his wayward cattle that drifted onto our lovely landscaped and irrigated land.

The sheriff, I’m sure with his tonguedeeply embedded in his cheek answered my questions with, “Free Range ma’am, if you want the cattle kept out of your yard, build a fence.”

Teri, my lovely sherpa, tries to keep me from embarrassing myself and normally stops me from making these sort of calls allowed me to make the call to confirm Free Range.

Well another lesson learned for this city girl living on a mountain. Next week I will be hiring  a fence builder on to phase three of the Dunning, Mohave County, Hualapai Mountain experience.

Schooled ~Susie