The mystery of the missing apples

We had a true Hardy Boys experience a couple of weeks ago. (Take that, Nancy Drew fans). It all started a year ago when we were thinking about buying the land. The landowner at the time was taking us through a site tour and told us how easy it is to attract deer by leaving apples out in a box. While his motives for doing this were almost undoubtedly hunting-related, it left a stamp in our animal-loving minds, prompting us to give it a shot one day when a bunch of our apples had aged beyond the threshold of human consumption. Thinking it wouldn't hurt to attract deer to our ten acres of hunting-free paradise, we left the apples out on the big rock out back. They stayed there for about a week, untouched. One day, as we arrived home from work, I noticed that the apples were gone. What a shame, thought I, that we missed seeing the deer come for them. I was also struck, in retrospect, by the mounds of turned up sand around the house. Must have been the pugs playing around. Later, when the dogs were playing a little too quietly outside, we went to check on them and found them huddled around an enormous mound of poop. We soon discovered that it was one of three enormous mounds of poop, one of which we'd driven through on our way up the driveway. To keep the dogs from snacking on it, I had the pleasure of collecting and discarding the poop, all 25 pounds of it. What on earth could have produced all of that in a single day (insert Dad joke here)? As I was out gathering wood, something compelled me to look a little closer at one of the dugouts of sand. I couldn't quite figure out what would have made such a strange mark. And there were more of them. Bent over with arms full, I began to follow what I had now discovered were tracks of a sort. Huge tracks. Could this have been a bear? No, I would be able to see the paw print, surely. And can a bear produce that much poop? It wasn't until I followed the tracks to the back of the house where there is earth rather than sand that I spotted it. A perfectly formed horseshoe track. One of many clustered around the apple altar rock. This was no bear. This was no deer. It was a horse. Now I really regretted having not been home to see it. I'm sure the dogs got quite the show out of the glass door. Missing a horse, anyone?