Backcountry Notes

This story is from a letter I wrote to my children on September 29, 2001.  Names have been changed to protect the guilty, but otherwise it is mostly all true.

As a kid, I didn’t go in much for “practical jokes” . . . exceptions including one time when my obnoxious cousin Bull* drove me nuts bragging about how he was better, smarter, faster, and otherwise superior in every way. Bull was visiting the family farm in North Carolina with his parents that day. We were walking along a lane by a field where my grandfather had an electric cattle fence when Bull said, “I wonder if that’s on.”

Now, while electric fences can be dangerous (a short circuit near the power source can be fatal to a man and is known by farmers as a “death short”), normally the amount of current going through the wire is very small. One reason for this is that cattle are far more sensitive than humans to electric current (a man can withstand a shock that would fell a steer several times his size). Another reason is that electric fencing relies on the element of surprise; animals don’t expect the unpleasant tingle, so they learn to avoid it. You don’t want to kill your cattle, see, just keep them in the pasture.

So if you knew that it was a low-voltage system, the standard method of testing whether your electric fence was on was to reach down and grab the wire; if it stung you, it was on. I knew that, but since Bull had spent his entire life, as far as I could tell, bragging and swaggering and admiring his reflection in mirrors, he didn’t appear to know much of anything. So an evil thought crept into my mind; I resisted the temptation, if only briefly, but I was weak, so I gave in.

“I wonder if that’s on,” Bull had said. I reached over and touched the wire. It was “hot.” “Don’t feel a thing,” I told Bull. He reached over and grabbed the wire (he did this only, I knew in my heart, so that he could go back to the city and brag to his friends that he had touched an electric fence and lived!). Bull squealed like a piglet and jumped three feet in the air, waving his wounded hand and blowing on it as if to put out the flames. “It’s on!” he glared at me. So I grabbed the wire and held on; I pulled it up a notch so he could see for certain I was making contact. Yup, it was on. “Nothing,” I lied; “you sure are skittish, Bull.” Not one to be known as "skittish," Bull grabbed the wire again and immediately repeated his piglet dance. I couldn’t help laughing and took the resulting look on Bull’s face as my cue to do the 100-yard dash back to the house.

Bull couldn’t run as fast as he claimed, nohow.

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* Bull - - not his real name, but a term of affection in honor of the credibility of his stories.