It was easy to catch the mule and the pony – figuring out where they came from took a little more effort, Hancock Fire Chief Tom Bates said after responding to a report of two loose horses on Forest Road at 6:20 a.m. on Sunday.
“Sure enough, there’s a couple horses just standing around, they were actually in somebody’s driveway,” Bates said, not far from the covered bridge. A responding police officer from Peterborough already had control of one of the animals, and Bates and First Assistant Chief John Birkey quickly got a lead line on the other. Being horse owners themselves, they had brought everything they needed from home, Bates said. “There are probably six of us on the Fire Department that have or have been around horses a long time, so this is nothing new for us,” he said.
The first responders walked the equines up the road to a property they suspected the horses had come from, but no animals were missing from there, Bates said. “It was quite the procession, a couple horses followed by a line of emergency vehicles,” he said, and after about an hour they were able to contact owner Samantha Walton, who came with a trailer to collect the duo.
“It’s a long walk from where the horses live to where we found them,” Bates said. Molly, a 20-year-old mule, and Gigja, a 26-year-old Icelandic pony, escaped from their pen at Walton’s farm near at the intersection of Bennington Road and Route 202 sometime after their feeding on Saturday night when a gate came open, Walton said.
“It was probably Molly,” she said. “She’s very smart. She may have opened it herself.”
It was a horrible moment when she walked out to feed her six horses in the morning and saw the open gate, with Molly and Gigja missing – all the worse as Gigja is a boarder, Walton said. She remembers seeing a motion detector light go off a couple times the previous night, but didn’t think anything of it at the time. Walton said she’s happy the pair stuck together on their nighttime venture, and to have them back and secure again. “Now we quadruple-check the gate,” she said.
“We’ve done strange things before,” Bates said, and rounding up livestock is just one of many oddities the Fire Department’s assisted with. “It was actually kind of funny,” he said. “and cold.”