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In his masterpiece, In Cold Blood, the author Truman Capote observed that neither Perry Smith nor Dick Hickok could have murdered the Clutter family alone but together they formed third personality.

The same was true of Buster and Casey as the roamed both the Harrigan property and ours.

Casey was a sweet little chocolate lab who wanted to be liked by everyone.

Buster, more aloof and a bit of a loudmouth, was really a nice dog that never bit anyone.

That said, if you were walking by the properties, one would sound the alarm and the other would start barking and this racket would continue until you traversed both properties.

It was particularly loud if you were wearing a mail uniform.

Despite their apparently different dispositions, it became clear, over time that Casey was in charge of this two dog pack.

She would periodically reassert this dominance by suddenly charging at Buster growling and snarling, chasing him through the electric fence and out into Strathmore Drive.

Buster would then be the recipient of a shock once he went through the fence and, again, when he returned.

When she got bored, Casey would steal a sneaker, shoe or some other object and make you chase her around the yard to get it back. She knew enough about frustration and torment to periodically drop it and then snatch it away as soon as you went to get it.

Occasionally, these episodes could result in a truly painful encounter.

I once stepped out into the yard as she came barreling around the garage with a golf club in her mouth which got me squarely on the knee.

I joined the long list of Irishmen who knew what it was to be “kneecapped.”

Buster had superb instincts and speed.

He could run like the wind, turn on a dime and would chase anything that moved or flew.

I often wondered what the neighbors watching from afar thought when they saw him charge out the door snapping at bees that they couldn’t see.

On one of their early morning walks behind Corcoran High School, he suddenly dove at a squirrel, causing it to leap up on Terri’s leg before trying to get away.

All before her morning cup of tea.

We ultimately learned, that despite his superb conditioning, Buster suffered from some of the congenital conditions common to pure-bred German Shepherds.

It first manifested itself when Terri noticed he wasn’t getting up either quickly or easily and seemed to lack his usual enthusiasm for his morning walk.

We took him to the Veterinary School at Cornell where they did a thorough work-up on him, including x-rays, and told us that he had a deteriorating disc in his back that was causing him discomfort.

The good news was that it could be surgically repaired.

Buster was required to stay there for a couple weeks after the surgery, which allowed me to tell the world that “there was finally a Fahey at Cornell.”

Once he came home, he was confined to the house for a couple of months and could only be taken outside for bathroom breaks on a dog sling.

Once the vet cleared him to return to everyday activities, he raced out the door and promptly blew out his ACL.

It was back to Cornell for a graduate degree.

All was well for a few more years until one morning he began to yelp in pain as he got up and down from the floor.

We took him back to Cornell for an evaluation and the vet called us while he was sedated on the x-ray table to tell us that bony scar tissue had grown through the spinal canal and was pressing on the nerves in his back.

He said that they could repair it, but it was only a matter of time before the condition repeated itself and caused the excruciating pain that he was in.

We both agreed that he was too nice a companion to put him through that again and again.

We enjoyed him for a good and memorable decade and still miss him.

I’ve been posting a piece here each week since January 2016 without a break.

I hope you have enjoyed reading them.

I’ve decided to step away from a weekly blog post for a while to concentrate on a couple of other writing projects that I’ve been neglecting.

I intend to post from time to time while concentrating on those projects and will alert in the usual way on Sunday night.

Thanks for reading and sharing my thoughts and experiences these past two and a half years,

It has been fun sharing them with you.

One of the things we discovered about Buster was that his protective instinct was constant whether it was in the yard, in the car or in the house.

My daughter, Meghan, loves to recount how he would happily get in the car to do errands with her and then hang out the window barking at everyone who passed by.

On one occasion, she was driving down Glenwood Avenue when she passes a woman jogging with earphones on, which kept her from hearing the car’s approach. As they came abreast of the jogger, Buster leaned out the window and let out a large bark near her ear. The poor woman jumped a foot into the ear, letting out a scream that almost caused Meghan to drive into the retaining wall next to the road.

When he was young, doing errands with him was a challenge. If you left him for a few minutes in Wegman’s parking lot, his separation anxiety would kick in and he’d hang out the window whining and crying loudly. On more than one occasion I came out of the store to find a crowd gathered around the car convinced that he was being tortured.

His sense of protection extended particularly to Terri, Meghan and Kate. If somebody came in the house and gave one of them a hug, he’d jump up on them to push them away. Very few people ignored this or pushed back. Ultimately, I was able to use this to my advantage.

Terri and I were reading in bed one night, when one of the girls came upstairs and asked if she could watch a movie downstairs with her boyfriend.

“Sure,” I replied, “make yourselves at home but don’t stay up too late.”

After she went back downstairs, Terri said to me, “Aren’t you concerned about them being downstairs alone?”

“They’re not alone,” I replied, “Buster is down there with them.”

I was dead certain that my boy would climb up on the couch across from them and the first time the guy put his arm around her, he’d be met with a low growl that would cause him to re-think the wisdom of that move or any others.

Buster never disappointed me in that situation.

Later, I would have to resort to introducing myself to a prospective boyfriend by declaring, “I want you to know that I used to represent people that killed people for a living.”

That introduction had the same effect as Buster’s growl but caused my daughters to take a dim view of me for a few days.

Buster could be somewhat discriminating about who he would let into the house.

One summer my elderly aunt, who lived in Canada, stayed with us while she attended a reunion.

Terri and I had plans for the evening of her reunion and gave her a key to the house in the event she came home ahead of us.

“I hope you’re not afraid of dogs, Aunt Margie,” I told her, “Buster can be territorial.”

“I’ll be fine,” she told me.

When we got home, we discovered that she had no problem getting into the house and going to sleep.

At the next family gathering, Margie’s visit came up and one of my cousins asked her if she wasn’t nervous trying to get into the house with a dog that size and that protective.

She waved away any concern telling the group, “it’s easy if you just reach in and pet him.”

My sense of security began to wane.

After Kate and Meghan went off to college, Terri, Buster and I continued to live in the six bedroom house on Strathmore Drive.

With the girls gone, sleeping arrangements shuffled somewhat and Buster now had a bedroom with a queen size bed at the end of the hall over the driveway.

For some reason that I never quite figured out, he also had the telephone in his room.

I am a pretty sound sleeper and I didn’t hear it ring one night when the police called to see if they could bring a search warrant over for me to review.

When I didn’t answer the call, they pulled into the driveway and knocked on the driveway door.

This resulted in Buster charging down the stairs, barking, which woke me up?

I threw some clothes on, went downstairs and let them in while I reviewed the warrant.

A few weeks later, they called with another warrant and, as usual, I didn’t hear the phone ring.

They pulled into the driveway and called the house again.

I later learned that after the second call, they called their superior for instructions about what to do.

“Go knock on Fahey’s door,” he told them, “that will wake the dog up and he’ll answer the door.

The cops and I had found our rhythm.

I was later recounting this tale to my friend, Larry Hackett, while Kate Fahey listened.

When I was done, she asked Larry, “Do you think Buster is a police dog?”

He thought about it for a minute and replied, “I think he’s more like a crossing guard dog.”

I wouldn’t argue with that.

More next week

When we agreed to take Buster, we really didn’t have a complete sense of what his personality was.

He was a year old and the couple who was giving him up assured us that he wasn’t mean or vicious and this seemed borne out by the way he interacted with their children when we were there.

We quickly discovered that he was a dominant dog as evidenced by the way he would try and herd Terri and the girls downstairs each morning by nipping at their ankles.

It became increasingly annoying for them and although they told him “no” or “stop” it continued.

It all came to a head one Sunday evening when he started it and I happened to be on the landing with Terri between the first and second floor.

I raised my voice and firmly told him “no,” only to be met with loud barking. I repeated the word louder and the barking got louder.

I swallowed hard reached down, grabbed him by the collar and pinned him on his back and repeated the word loudly.

I held him on the floor for a minute and repeated “no” again before letting him up.

Little did he know how nervous I was about this show down.

We had one more encounter like this and then he accepted the fact that I was leader of the pack.

From that day forward, he would, for the most part, obey when I gave a command…….unless I let him off the leash and he went stone deaf.

He was also very territorial and protective.

For the first couple of weeks, he wouldn’t let the Harrigans cleaning lady come up the driveway to get to their house. Eventually, he decided she was part of the pack and relented.

A more complicated situation involved deliveries to their house.

Denny did much of her writing at home and was the recipient of occasional FedEx deliveries.

Since we didn’t know when the FedEx deliveries were scheduled, whether the package was delivered might depend on whether Buster and Casey were outside.

Although we later discovered that Casey held the upper hand between them, she was only too happy to back Buster up when it came to preventing deliveries.

All of this was minor compared to the situation that shortly unfolded after Buster’s arrival.

Terri and I were standing in our kitchen one Saturday morning, when we heard a loud male voice repeatedly shout, ” How do you like that?”

We opened the door onto the driveway and found the mailman spraying Buster with a can of “Halt.”

Buster had backed up, out of range and was barking loudly.

Apparently, the mailman had come up the driveway and was trying to put the mail in the box, which squeaked loudly, resulting in Buster racing around the house from the back yard barking.

I tried to calm the mailman down by telling him that Buster had never bitten anyone which seemed to give him little comfort or reassurance.

Over time, I would give this same assurance to visitors that he barked at until Terri told me that it didn’t have the desired effect.

The mailman left after uttering a few choice curse words and I had the vague realization that I had seen this movie before.

I quickly got into the car and drove to the Post Office on South Ave, where I rented a post office box.

The ghost of my sister’s dog, Lucky, had returned.

A month or two after we started picking up the mail at the post office, our mailman went on vacation and his substitute made a friend of Buster, by providing him with dog treats.

Mail deliveries resumed for two weeks until our regular mailman returned.

He would march past the house, glaring at Buster with his can of “Halt” in his outstretched hand.

Buster and Casey dutifully ignored him.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the workings of an invisible fence, I’ll try and explain it.

I should warn you that my knowledge of all things scientific is primitive and my primitive explanation could be wrong.

A wire is buried several inches in the ground which looped around both properties at their rear and side perimeters and then across a portion of the front yard.

A unit with a transmitter mounted in Kevin’s garage sent electricity to make the wire hot and also, depending on the strength of the signal, caused the dog collar to beep at a certain distance from the fence and delivered a shock to the collar if the wire was crossed.

The distance between when the beeping started and the wire could be increased or decreased by raising or lowering the frequency.

The first time we turned the fence on, the frequency was so high the dogs wouldn’t leave the house.

Buster and Kevin’s dog, Casey, a small female chocolate lab looked forlornly at each other across the driveway from kitchen doors that faced each other.

Once we got the frequency lowered to an appropriate level, we had to walk the dogs around the yard so that they would get familiar with the beeping.

There were a few draw backs to the invisible fence.

If the power went out the fence was useless. This happened a couple of times allowing Buster to wander freely throughout the neighborhood.

Another drawback was the battery in the collar getting low.

I could usually tell that was occurring when Buster would venture further and further down the driveway and ever closer to the line in the driveway under which the wire was buried.

The sales representative that sold us the fence advised us that we could tell if the collar or the fence was in operation by walking down the driveway holding the collar and listening for the beep.

He neglected to tell me that you shouldn’t hold it with your fingers on the prongs that delivered the electric shock.

I learned that lesson the hard way.

The third and most complicated was a break in the wire.

On one occasion an adjacent property owner took it upon himself to clear weeds and brush along the rear property line.

He dutifully dug up the wire, thinking it was a root, he cut it.

I didn’t have much of a challenge finding that break and was able to shut the fence down while I spliced it back together with heavy duty electrical tape.

The challenge in finding other breaks came when the wire was cut while mowing the grass or doing yard work.

On the occasions when that occurred, it was necessary to get down on hands and knees and follow the wire around the property until the break appeared. It was like looking for the proverbial needle in the hay stack.

For whatever reason, we were always able to locate the break and splice it back together.

As Otto Von Bismarck once observed, “God smiles on fools, drunkards and the United States.”

While the fence kept the dogs in most of the time, it didn’t keep anything out.

Buster and Casey would lay in the front yard and watch the world go by.

Another neighbor’s cat, Olive, learned that she could inflict extreme emotional distress on both dogs by running into the yard and then scampering outside the fence as both dogs charged at her full speed while the collars beeped.

That led to a discussion with my daughter Kate, who asked what she could get Buster for Christmas.

“Well,” I said after a minute, “I’d bet he’d like his very own cat.”

“You’re awful Dad,” was the only reply.

In due time, history would repeat itself.

More to come next week.

Terri and I hadn’t been living on Strathmore Drive in the city, when she proposed that we get a dog.

“What kind?” I asked. “How about a German-Shepherd” she responded.

When she was single and living in Portland, Maine, she had a shepherd named “Caleb,” who was, by all accounts, the model dog.

I’d had dogs growing up but never a pure breed and never a shepherd.

Our dogs were mutts that came from somewhere which now escapes me.

My sister, Jane, brought home what appeared to be an escaped junk yard dog, that she named “Lucky.”

He didn’t like anybody but her.

When my brother Jim came home from his tour with the poverty program, VISTA, it was a few weeks before the dog would let him in the house without one of us having to meet him at the door.

Lucky stayed with us for a number of years during which we had to pick the mail up at the post office because he would take the seat off the mail carrier’s pants.

His encounters with the mail carrier weren’t by chance.

He dug a pretty good sized hole under a bush next to our house and would lie in it up to his neck and charge out when the mail carrier least expected it.

On some nights he would refuse to come in the house and would lie outside chasing traffic-particularly motorcycles.

My father would stay up all night with the screen door propped open and try to entice him into the house, when suddenly a motorcycle would go by.

The next day I heard him yelling, “You’re no Goddamn good. You stay out all night. You don’t come home. You keep everyone up!”

It took a while for it to register that he was yelling at the dog and not one of my brothers.

Lucky disappeared as mysteriously as he came.

One of the neighbors told us that they thought they saw him go by in the back of a pick-up truck but he neglected to get the license number.

Terri came across an ad in one of the weeklies that said a German-shepherd was up for adoption to a good home.

We made arrangements to visit.

My first impression of Buster was that he was the largest German-Shepherd I had ever seen.

He came into the house and proceeded to go from table to table picking up any toy the children had left behind.

The owners told us that he was only a year old but they decided that since they had a number of small children that they just didn’t have the time to spend with him.

They assured us that he was very good with children and I was reassured by seeing that he seemed quite gentle around them.

Terri and I told them we would talk and let them know what our decision about taking him would be.

I have to say that he was one of the most beautiful dogs I had ever seen.

We both came away with the impression that he seemed quite gentle and, since Terri had experience with shepherds, we decided to adopt him.

We brought him home and our adventures started.

Probably the first thing we learned was that if he was outside off the leash, he went completely deaf.

You could call his name until you were blue in the face and he wouldn’t come until he felt like it.

That never changed.

We both had some real safety concerns about this.

He had moved from the country to the city and the traffic was much denser so the possibility of his getting injured or killed by a car was very real.

Our second concern was that he could get dognapped and wind up in one of those dog fighting rings that seemed to be proliferating at that time.

Since we were both working it wasn’t fair to leave him in the house all day and we learned that there were down sides to that.

Shepherds, in particular, suffer from separation anxiety and during the short period we struggled to come up with a solution, he destroyed a couch in our television room.

The solution would have to come fast.

I got estimates from a number of fence companies but they were not only expensive but there was no guarantee he couldn’t jump the fence.

Strathmore was a beautiful neighborhood and the last thing I wanted to do was put up a chain link fence that looked like the second coming of Attica Correctional Facility.

As it turned out, the solution was across the driveway.

We shared a driveway with Kevin and Denny Harrigan who became great neighbors and great friends.

They had a female chocolate lab named Casey and they were wrestling with the same dilemma.

While neither of our yards alone afforded the dogs much room to run, if we fenced both of them they had plenty of room to play.

We hit upon putting an invisible fence that ran around the perimeter of both our houses and the dogs would be able to keep each other company and have room to play.

It would prove to be one of the most entertaining sagas I ever was privileged to witness.

More to come next week.

Once Donovan passed away, Terri was faced with a dilemma.

She had only two mules and taking one out for a ride would throw the remaining one into a panic because of separation anxiety.

The only recourse was to get another equine.

To my surprise, she wasn’t going to restrict her choice to mules.

Horses were in the running so to speak.

She spread the word among her riding group and everyone was on the lookout for a likely candidate.

Throughout most of 2016, Terri checked out a number of likely prospects to no avail.

Finally in October 2016, she learned from a friend about a Tennessee walking horse that she might sell.

Tennessee walkers are prized for their smooth gait.

When I was considering what kind of equine to buy, my friend and horse guru, Gordon Bellair, was very high on my getting a Tennessee walker.

Instead, because I’m a chicken at heart when it comes to heights, I opted for a mule because they were so conscious of their own safety that they won’t do anything dangerous to themselves and, presumably, me.

If I’d chosen another path, I would probably have missed out on my pal, Donovan.

Terri and several of her riding group went to look at the Tennessee walker and, as promised, he provided a very smooth ride.

Cody came home that fall.

Once Cody became part of the herd, there was a change in the pecking order.

Cody is younger and bigger than Franklin and established himself as the barnyard boss.

Where once Franklin was able to bully Donovan out of his grain, he now found himself on the receiving end.

I can’t say my heart broke for him.

Like all of her other equines, Terri spent a lot of time doing ground work with him in the round pen learning commands.

Cody proved to be an apt student picking up the commands quickly.

He was so responsive, that during a gathering of her riding group at our house, she remarked on how pleasant it was to not have to play tug of war with a 1,500 pound mule on the other end of a rope who didn’t want to come.

“Who knew?” she said out loud.

After a pregnant moment of silence, her friend, Laurie Bobbett, said “We all did,” to a roomful of laughter.

While the third equine would appear to have solved the separation anxiety that would have arisen with the mules, Terri wasn’t done acquiring a herd.

I should have recognized that in the way we accumulate animals.

We now have two dogs, two cats and three chickens.

Occasionally someone will ask me if I have considered building an ark.

The truth is that I have.

The problem is that I would be tempted to set sail without them.

Earlier this year, Terri and her girlfriends went to a horse sale and she spotted a paint horse.

She was told that he came from Kentucky but the reality is that he could have come from anywhere.

He’s a nice, quiet, responsive and obedient guy who will be occupying the fourth stall that is being readied for him.

He is presently being boarded at Terri’s riding instructor, Meg Titus’s barn.

His name is Finn and he’ll be arriving home soon.

I don’t know if he is the last of the menagerie or whether there is another set of animals in our future.

The only prediction I am prepared to make is that when I ultimately go on to my great reward, those mules will be fighting over my recliner.

This also brings me to the end of my series on our animals.

I hope you enjoyed it.

I don’t know what I’ll be blogging about next weeks.

If it’s about current events, public officials or politicians at the state or national level, we will have segued from half-asses to complete asses.

When was the last time we got to do that?

Once all of the mules arrived home, they settled into a somewhat mundane existence punctuated by their periodic parties and escapes.

Franklin became the boss of the pasture, a role which Donovan was willing to abdicate and Tulip never expressed any interest in.

Donovan was content to hang out, eat grain and hay and was agreeable to the riders who wanted to saddle him up.

According to the woman I purchased him from, he had been part of a “hack line” at one of the resorts in the Catskills who ferried guests interested in a trail ride through the adjacent mountains.

He gave every indication that this had been his lot in life. Once saddled up, he was perfectly willing to munch grass in the yard while he waited for the other equines to join the trail ride.

In fact, munching grass became his focus in life.

If we went out on a trail ride, there would be an endless repetition to it.

He would walk six feet, stop and eat grass.

Walk another six feet and stop and eat grass.

There was no solution to this pattern.

You could kick his haunches, tap him with a crop, whatever, he would move another six feet and stop for grass.

I came to the conclusion that if Donovan and I had to ride to California, like they did two hundred years ago, we would both be dead from old age by the time we reached Ohio.

At the same time, I came to enjoy the ride, if you could call it that.

He would dutifully follow the other mules or horses and never let them out of his sight even if we stopped for grass.

Despite being the world’s most nervous trail rider, I became confident enough on his back to bring along a camera and take pictures of country and scenery you might never see.

Sometimes, we would be on a trail ride and others wanted to gallop.

Donovan and I didn’t.

“Make him run,” I’d be told. “He doesn’t want to run,” I’d respond, “I don’t want him to run either.”

In time, he became our go-to mule.

Friends would come out with their children and when they saw the mules, the first thing they would do is look at Tulip and ask Terri and I, “Do you think my kid could ride that smaller one ?”

“I wouldn’t ride that smaller one,” I would reply, “but I would put them up on Big D,” I’d say pointing at Donovan.

They would look at me skeptically and say “Are you sure ?”

Once I informed them that my two-year-old granddaughter had been up on him in the round pen, while we walked along with her, for a few turns, they were sold.

I can’t begin to count the number of little ones who had their first mule ride on Big D.

Little ones weren’t the only people who got bit by the trail riding bug because they got up on Donovan.

We had many friends who had not ridden in years or ever before, who took a ride on him and then started to take lessons to learn more about how to continue.

He never gave anyone anything but a memorable and enjoyable experience.

My riding teacher, Nancy Cerio, described him as “push button.”

She was right.

As Donovan began to age more, his balance became unsteady and he would start to stumble more frequently.

I also began to suspect that his eye sight was dimming.

It became increasingly clear that a trail ride would leave him very tired and sore.

It dawned on me that if he were to fall with me on his back that we were both going to get really hurt.

It was time for both of us to retire from trail riding.

He became a pasture companion and stuck close to hid herd. If you took either Franklin or Tulip out for a trail ride he would bray loudly over and over again until they returned.

More than once I wondered if the neighbors and passersby thought that he was being tortured because there was no doubting his anguish from being separated from his fellow barn mates.

Now, the rides for children who were visiting, fell to Franklin and Tulip who performed this task agreeably.

Some adults took Franklin out for a trail ride if Terri went along on Tulip but there was still no telling what Tulip would do with a stranger up on her back.

In August 2016 old age caught up to Donovan and he went on to his great reward.

It was one of the saddest days of my life because he was truly one of the sweetest animals that God ever created.

He’s buried in the pasture and Terri planted wild flowers on his grave.

Now each spring when the flowers bloom we are reminded of how lucky we were to have had him in our lives and we retell the stories about the jailbreaks and his Animal House Party.

He still provides both joy and laughter.

More Next week.

I was sitting in my home office early one morning a few years ago when I heard the clopping of hooves outside.

I was pretty sure it wasn’t Santa’s reindeer in the middle of May.

I jumped up and looked out the window to see the south end of a mule going north on the road outside our house, along with two other mules.

After swearing under my breath, I called the office and told my staff that I would be late and to tell the lawyers who were scheduled to appear, to go on to the other courts they had appearances in that morning.

“What’s wrong?” my court attorney asked.

“There’s been a jail break,” I answered, “”I’ll explain later.”

I went outside where Terri had a bucket of grain and a lead rope.

Since there were horses a few barns north of us, we didn’t have to go far.

The mules were racing around our neighbor’s property and did their best to elude capture.

I knew we had no hope of catching Tulip or Franklin but since Donovan was close to my age, I was confident that he wasn’t going to run forever.

Sure enough, he started to tire and began getting increasingly interested in the bucket of grain.

As he stuck his nose in the grain bucket, Terri threw the lead rope over his head and he decided to go quietly.

With Donovan in custody, we started to walk south to our barn. Mules being such herd animals, it wasn’t long before Franklin and Tulip fell in behind us.

When we got back to the barn, it became apparent that the three of them had gotten out through Donovan’s stall.

That was how we learned that despite his age, Donovan had a talent for opening his stall door if it was left just so slightly ajar.

It wouldn’t be the last time.

Later that year, we decided to have an addition added to the barn and hired our Amish builder for the job.

It was a cold December night that had a mixture of snow and drizzle falling.

I was driving up our road when out of the corner of my eye, I saw three mules standing on a neighbor to the north’s lawn.

I swear that they almost seemed to wave to me as I drove by.

I went home and discovered that one of the workmen who had been building the addition to the barn had left a gate open.

Terri and I drove to the neighbor’s property with a bucket of grain and only Donovan was there.

Franklin and Tulip had decided to explore the woods behind the homes on the road and you could hear them crashing through the brush.

The danger was that it was both dark and rush hour and if they suddenly broke out onto the road, they could get hit by a vehicle.

Terri saddled up Donovan and went into the woods and was able to herd them home.

It was a nerve wracking experience.

The most memorable jail break involved them not even leaving the barn.

Terri and I had been out on a weekend night and arrived home pretty late.

As we were getting ready for bed, she said “I think there is someone in the barn.”

I listened and didn’t hear anything and suggested we get some sleep.

After a few minutes I heard the noise too.

“Maybe we should take a look,” she said.

We went out to the barn, opened the door and Franklin and Tulip were standing in the middle of the barn eating hay.

It was also clear that they had managed to get into the grain room and eat in there, until their hearts and stomachs were content.

The most mysterious part of this was that although Donovan’s stall door was open (he managed to do it again!), he was nowhere to be seen.

Since both barn doors had been closed, I knew that he hadn’t gotten outside.

Needless to say, it isn’t hard to miss a sixteen hand, almost two-thousand pound mule in an enclosed space.

To say the least, I was perplexed.

Suddenly, we both heard a noise in the tack room.

We opened the door to discover that Donovan had managed to get into the room, shut the door on the other two mules so that he could consume all of the horse treats stored in there by himself.

He looked both content and pleased with himself.

We put all of them back into their stalls and surveyed the scene.

I don’t know how long they had been out of their stalls but the place was a complete mess.

It looked like a party scene from the movie, “Animal House” and the phrase “partying like its 1999,” kept going through my head.

We agreed to clean the mess in the morning, since it looked like it would take all night.

The next day, as we were cleaning up, Terri said, “Look at this.”

I walked to where she was standing and saw my riding helmet lying upside down on the floor with a large pile of horse manure inside it.

“It looks like Franklin finally got back at me for all that hissing,” I said.

“No,” she answered, “that was in the tack room, Donovan must have done that.”

“And I thought we were so close,” I told her.

When I’m leaving the barn now, you can hear the loud clanging of the stall doors as I make sure they are all securely locked in.

It sounds like Attica at the end of the day.

More to come.

Once all of the mules were home, we started to learn who would be in charge in the herd.

I hesitate to use the term “pecking order” since Terri acquired five chickens and they were establishing their own hierarchy.

Donovan was the largest of the mules at about seventeen hands but he had no interest in being the boss.

I chalk that up to his being a draft horse cross and they are general considered to be pretty docile.

I also think he was closer to my age, in the mid-sixties, than the fifteen years the vet in Pennsylvania claimed.

I’m only kidding about his being in his sixties. Mules can live up to forty years old and if I had to hazard a guess I would say at least thirty when I brought him home.

Donovan’s only interest was in eating, hanging with his herd and being fed treats, which I was glad to provide him.

Tulip had no interest in being the boss either.

She is kind of stand offish except with Terri, who lavishes all of them with affection as she does all of the animals including the chickens.

Her one real pleasure in life appears to be torturing the boys when she periodically goes into heat.

During the most inclement weather, she prefers to stay outside the barn and, on those occasions when Terri travels and I have barn duty, it can be a challenge to coax her inside for her grain.

The role of being boss didn’t fall to Franklin by default. He stepped right up to the plate and claimed the mantle against all comers.

If there was any doubt about who is the boss, it became clear when it was time for them to get a bucket of grain hung on the inside of their stall doors.

Franklin would quickly down his and then muscle his way into the other stalls to eat Tulip and Donovan’s grain too.

Poor Donovan, who was too old for combat, would wail and try to block him but it didn’t always work.

Nothing would annoy me more than to see him bully this old mule out of his grain.

If I was in the barn when he started it, I would make a loud hissing noise and he would flee Donovan’s stall.

Terri wasn’t happy with my solution and Franklin would be a bit wary around me for a while.

Remembering our vet’s earliest warning, I was always on guard to avoid getting kicked in the head.

Not long after they were all home, I learned that they were not only cautious but very curious too.

The Amish builder had installed latches on the outside door to each stall but they were of little help in keeping the mules in their stalls.

All of them quickly learned that they could pop the latch by simply hitting the door with their chest. It complicated matters if you put them in the stall just before a visit from the vet, the furrier or equine dentist.

Just as that person would arrive one or more of them would pop the latch and you would have to go out and catch them to return them for the visit.

Terri asked me if I could do something about it and I went to Home Depot and bought three large sliding bolt locks. I’m not particularly handy but I figured out that even I could install them on the outside of the stall doors.

I brought out the locks, a drill and a bucket that I kept various tools in and sent them up on a small stool outside of the stall doors.

As I drilled and screwed the locks onto each of the doors, I suddenly had an audience behind me that was paying rapt attention.

Before long I had three huge heads looking over my shoulders keeping track of my progress.

I’m not sure whether it was plain curiosity or a recognition of what I was doing but part way through my security installation, Tulip dumped the stool, the bucket and my tools over into the pasture.

Still, I didn’t let this apparent minor act of rebellion deter me.

As I finished each of the installations, the mules wandered into the stalls and I locked them in.

They each seemed somewhat disappointed as they learned that they couldn’t open the stall door with a push.

I stepped back, looked at them and announced, “Your days of coming and going as you please are over.”

Little did I know that they would prove me wrong over and over again.

To be continued next week.

In July of 2011, Terri’s barn was completed. Watching it being built was a true education in culture and the American work ethic.

Terri had contracted with an Amish builder named Andy Byler who built the barn from start to finish in eleven days.

The crew of builders numbered anywhere from two to six although for much of the time Andy worked alone.

The Amish culture frowns on much of modern technology including motor vehicles. That meant that Andy would pay someone to drive him and his employees from their community in Madison County to our home.

After the project got underway, Andy, his wife Paulie and their infant lived with another couple in an Airstream on our property while they built the barn.

The hammering started at sun-up and ended at sun-down. I had never seen anyone work harder.

While they were forbidden to use electric tools, they cut their lumber with gas-powered chain saws.

Instead of using nail guns, they made do with hammers and they were so expert in their craft that there was almost never a wasted or bent nail.

As the job unfolded Terri and I learned a lot about their world.

We learned that although formal education stopped during teen years, Andy and his crew were some of the brightest and most inquisitive kids I ever got to know.

I refer to them as “kids” because they were in their early twenties and younger than both Kate and Meghan.

Andy could lay out a job with the eye and skills of a trained architect. He could estimate and acquire materials as well as any project manager and, if what we planned didn’t seem right, he could redesign it on the fly.

We also learned that once schooling ended, these young Amish kids were allowed a year to live outside their communities in which they could experience the modern conveniences and freedoms from restrictions before deciding whether they wanted to return and remain part of their Amish communities.

This explained Andy’s encyclopedic knowledge of country music and country and western radio stations which I found on the truck radio while transporting them back to Madison County at the end of some of the work days.

Bruce Springsteen’s music wasn’t lost on them either.

One day I came home early and encountered Andy and his friend and fellow crew member, Owen, waiting for a delivery and reading the morning paper which we still have delivered.

There was a story in the paper about one of my defendants cursing at me during a court proceeding and whom I’d held in contempt.

Andy asked me, “Did that fellow really say those words to you in court ?” “Yes, he did.” I replied. There was a moment of silence and then Owen said in astonishment, “Holy cats!”

I told Owen that if the guy had said that, instead of swearing at me, he wouldn’t be in jail.

One of the features that would be integral to the barn was water.

We were fortunate that our friend and next door neighbor, Kevin Carter, is a superb excavator.

Terri hired him to dig and install the water line running from the house to the barn and he dug a trench that ran well below the frost line.

We learned how accomplished Kevin was, when we had an unusually frigid winter and water lines in many of the other barns on the road froze, requiring the barn owners to hand carry buckets of water from their homes to the barns for their animals several times a day until the spring thaw.

Once the barn was done, it was time for the mules to come home.

Franklin came home first.

Nancy Cerio brought him home in a trailer and we walked him into the barn and put him in a stall that had access to the pasture.

I was about to get my first demonstration of exactly how herd bound mules are.

Franklin walked out into the pasture faced east and began to bray loudly.

He clearly didn’t like being separated from all the horses that he had spent the past several month with.

I was astounded to see that in facing east, he knew exactly in which direction his herd was.

He continued to bray loudly and my neighbor, Kevin Carter, asked me, “He isn’t going to do that all night is he ?”

“No, of course not” I told him although I had no idea whether he was or not.

The braying continued over the next couple of hours but the breaks between the brays became longer until he stopped altogether.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief as I got all of us a beer and we toasted to silence.

Tulip came home next and Franklin was delighted to have a pasture mate especially one who was female.

Mules are sterile but no one has told them.

Donovan remained at Nancy’s for several more weeks gaining weight while I continued to work with him.

I learned the hard way that you should always give an equine a wide berth when walking them. I was walking Donovan from the pasture to the barn and he stepped on my foot.

It didn’t help that it was about half an hour before the start of golf league and I was wearing soft golf shoes.

Once he got his fifteen hundred pound hoof of my foot, I managed to limp to the car and limp through a round of golf.

Since my golf game is so bad normally, the guys in league thought I was making the limp up as an excuse.

The next day I went out and bought a pair of steel toed boots which I wore whenever I was around the mules in the future.

A couple of weeks later Donovan came home and the menagerie was partially complete.

More to come next week.