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.