How To Keep Bud From Digging Under The Fence

I was a little more than annoyed when I called the dogs in from the yard and Bud didn’t come.  I knew what to expect when I went to look for him.   There was Bud on the other side of the fence, the moist brown earth piled up in front of a hole he had dug under it.

Bud looked at me through the wire rectangles as if he didn’t know what to do or how he had gotten where he was.

By the time I went back into the house and out the front door to get him, he was on the porch eager to come in.

I knew what had to be done.

Our handyman Mike came and put some flat rocks  in the corner of the fence where Bud had been digging.  It seemed a good solution.  It’s much harder or hopefully even not easily possible for Bud to dig under the flat rocks.

He’d have to dig an actual tunnel to get where he wanted to go.

Fortunately we have plenty of rocks flat, round and rectangular on the farm.  The old  foundation in the barnyard is our closest quarry.

So I got the wheelbarrow and started to load it with rocks.

Four at a time seemed a good number.  Not so heavy that I couldn’t push the wheelbarrow, and four rocks covered enough ground to make me feel like I was accomplishing something.

In the barnyard I set the wheelbarrow on solid ground, always pointing downhill. There was no avoiding the mud between me and the gate, so I aimed for the narrowest section.  Out the gate and into the dogyard which is pocked with more holes where the dogs dig.

I got pretty good at avoiding them, but I know enough that when I do get stuck in a hole not to try and go forward.  It’s either back up and go around it, or if possible, lift the wheel out of the hole and angle it to the side on high ground.

At the fence I laid the rocks as if making a foundation for a stone wall.  I matched flat edges and angled edges keeping the width of the rocks to at least 8 inches.

As I went back and forth from the barn yard to the fence, I thought of Ivan Denosovitch from Solzhenitsyn’s book One Day In The Life of Ivan Denosovitch.

Not that I was comparing myself to being in a prison camp forced to do hard labor.  It was Ivan’s attitude that I was thinking of.  How every day he went work, in freezing temperatures, doing  the back breaking work of laying a brick wall that he knew had no purpose.

But he knew that the only way to keep himself alive was to do the best job he could.  Not to think about the results of what he was doing, but to dedicate himself to the work and give meaning to each brick he laid.

It’s the idea of being present in the work at the moment.  Not about getting it done.

“How do you eat and elephant? One bite at a time.”

It felt good when I laid that last rock down along the fence line.  Rocks like a ruffle or uneven lace, only hard and heavy.  Hopefully too heavy for Bud to move, and too much trouble for him to dig under.

If we were smart, I thought as I pushed the wheelbarrow full of rocks though the mud,  we would fill up each hole that Bud dug with concrete, eventually creating a cement footing along the whole fence.

Let Bud do the digging since he does it so well.