Containing the wild things: of cats, coyotes, & cows; also moose, horses & corn.

The grass is always greener on the other side. Anon.

Good fences make good neighbors. Robert Frost

Ohmygod, they're headed this way. Caroline Nesbitt

Last night we were kept awake by a coyote barking wildly in the field next to our house. Maybe a young one, excited or threatened. Maybe having treed a raccoon, a skunk - or one of our cats. I do a head count every morning; last thing at night I exhort all our cats to hunt near home and not wind up as coyote food. When they cross the lines and don't return, I mourn them.

The coyotes rarely visit our own field, which is bounded by electric fence. Now and then we're awakened by the yowl of a youngster who has touched a curious nose to the lower strand and discovered the power of tamed lightning. The adults have learned to use dense fur as a barrier between flesh and wire when crossing from one side of the field to the other, but they don't hang around inside. Tamed lightning is tricky; the openness of the hayfields safer.

The fence thus makes a tidy boundary between the wild and the domestic, although its actual raison d'etre is to persuade our horses to renounce the nomadic tendency that is their biological imperative.

Of the myriad concerns that make fence building necessary, the most important is safety. Traffic is a source of perennial horror here in New Hampshire; hunting season posing another serious threat. Fences are no guarantee, of course. Recently a local horse escaped its fence after dark and, terrified and lost, jumped through the windshield of an oncoming car. Misdirected hunters account for at least one mistaken shooting per year. But fences minimize danger by providing a visible barrier between Us and The Dangers That Lurk Outside, as long as everyone involved respects them.

Fences also serve a political necessity. Our next-door neighbor's market garden forms the backbone of his living. The massive price we must pay for our stock transgressing the border ranges from our sudden ownership of several hundred squashed melons, to vet bills incurred by horses gorged into oblivion on illicit corn.

My neighbor has been magnanimous after rare and quickly rectified break-outs onto his land of abundance. He maintains that our patrolling dogs prevent far more crippling destruction by corn-marauding raccoons, thus evening the score. But another neighbor did not fare so well. His cattle, bought as bush-eating scenery and cared for erratically if at all, wandered through their pasture fence when the feed ran out one day, and then devoured a large section of cornfield. Assurances that the fence-to-end-all-fences had been constructed to prevent further transgressions came to naught as soon as the animals were hungry again. "He bought an awful lot of corn," my neighbor said ruefully.

The owner concluded that mowing was a cheap alternative to keeping cattle, and shipped the culprits for slaughter. I expect they were better off dead, given their circumstances; though I would be hard pressed to say they deserved their fate. The lesson was almost Machiavellian in its simplicity: Feed those whose lives you have made your responsibility. Give them contentment at home. And secure your borders.

We find electric fencing both cheap and easy to maintain, but it has one major drawback: Moose. In benign moods, moose are content to jump the fences while ranging across the immense territories that have been their highways for thousands of years. But every now and then a bull takes exception to these obstacles to free movement, hooks a great rack under the top wire, and yanks it with a whaaannngg that rings for miles and sends hefty posts flying out of the ground like so many Tinker toys. Eventually we learned to use wire strongly tensioned by large springs that makes the whole thing collapsible under pressure - a sort of be as the reed and not the oak" slant on containment policy.

Detractors of electric fence say its relative invisibility poses a danger to forgetful horses indulging in normal behaviors like galloping idiotically around their fields on windy days. And indeed, you would no more let a strange horse into an unfamiliar field fenced with wire than turn your son loose with the car just because he became sixteen today. You educate it first, then send the creature out with law-abiding companions who understand to the fraction what the parameters are. Once habituated, horses can safely stroll into any field and spot the perimeters by following post lines.

So invisibility is not a problem. But snow is. Snow turns horses into birds on telephone wires. No ground contact. No shock. In effect - no fence.

Most horses never take advantage of this. I've watched conservative animals run familiar pathways, whinnying piteously, while renegade fence-breakers race away for more exotic landscapes. Why do some hesitate while others seize any serendipitous opening? It isn't stupidity. They know the difference between hot fence and downed fence as surely as we understand breaking-and-entering, or the difference between double-yellow and dotted lines on an open, empty road at dawn. Is it fear of pain or retribution that keeps them in? Habit? The comfort of the known?

Could it even be some moral sense developed over years of acquiescence to the necessities of human civilization, something whispering to them that this is not good, not acceptable, possibly even dangerous? Some will argue that horses don't possess this sophistication of thought. Yet they are herd animals, and herds have rules far more stringent, with punishments far more severe, than those meted out by the sting of a fence.

Herds also offer the balm of comfort, food, and company, reinforcing a conviction that there is no immediate reason to expend the energy required, to do something different; something it behooves me to remember while teaching young horses that they must obey certain rules.

Moose and coyotes are just as likely to be variously shot, run over, and crop-damaging as our horses. But they represent a culture outside of mine, and the best we can do is adapt to one another, coming to certain agreements regarding who inhabits, who passes through, and what may or may not be eaten en route. Tamed lightning isn't a perfect solution - but then, what fence or wall or national boundary or locked door exists that isn't somehow permeable? There is something in a limit that begs to be pushed, and thousands of beings that can argue with perfect validity that their right to invade, escape, or re-invent is just and God-given.

So this past winter I struggled with a scofflaw filly who, weaned too soon before heavy snow, had no respect for our fences. There was nothing she wouldn't jump. Nothing she wouldn't run through. I was left to curse and repair the damage, wait for spring to bring hooves back in contact with damp earth, and to listen for the dulcet crraack of electricity arcing against naked flesh that teaches the lessons that will permit the filly to thrive here.

I've always felt a little smug about my unfettered life in a rural area. No boundaries, no locked doors, no fears; not like my friends who live in secured buildings in places like New York City. But I suppose when it comes right down to it I'm really no different from my friends in the city, or my remote kin in small countries the world over. Always trying to keep something out. Something else in. With no one to say as a matter of absolute truth whether it is dire necessity or merely a well-argued convenience.

Caroline Nesbitt is an actress as well as the author of The Pony Breeder's Companion (Howell Book House, 1995). She lives in North Sandwich, New Hampshire.