Well, no. In fact, the gent was standing on a rolled-out length of welded-steel fencing. He was measuring out a length before cutting it from the roll behind him. But why the odd walk?

Encased in work boots, the old guy's feet measure exactly twelve inches. He'd already done that odd walk along the fence line, and now was repeating it to get the length of fencing he needed. See? He only seemed crazy.

But if you were a walker seeing this tightrope act, and if you then saw his next move, you might really have gone to look for his wife. For after cutting the length of fence, the gent began an odd dance: right foot put down next to left, then right raised and moved sideways, and left brought again to join it.

He repeated these steps eight times, moving west to east. Then he took one step north and repeated the whole pattern, this time east to west.

"Poor old git!" you might have thought. "He's really slipped out of gear." And you'd have walked on, thinking sadly about what accumulating years can do to normality. With a sigh, you might have murmured, "There's what lies ahead of all of us!"

But wait! The old boy had not lost his last marbles in the grass. He was just doing the Arrie two-step, a maneuver taught him by his farming mentor, Arrie Hecox. After you've rolled out a length of fence, said Arrie, and after you've measured and cut it, you have to get the curl out. He meant the tendency to recoil that comes from its having been tightly rolled. And so you flip the length over and you dance on it. Well, tromp on it, really, being careful to stamp on every juncture of wire. That flattens the fence.

As I do my stomping, I always sing, "Bye, Bye, Blackbird," which sets the right rhythm for the footwork. (Wait, am I revealing too much?) Anyway, then I'm ready to attach the fencing to the posts.

My last week's dancing follows on our re-enclosing Anne's 2,875 square foot vegetable garden. Anne took over the garden, then half that size, shortly after she moved up from Annapolis and threw in her lot with me. Then she took the Cornell Extension Service's master gardener program. That's when she went into gardening overdrive and added lots of exotics that I'd never thought of raising.

It's been a hugely productive garden ever since, giving us endless vegetables to freeze and can and pickle and dry. For all those years, though, we've been fighting off deer. "Rats with hooves," as a neighbor calls them, stage regular night sorties out of our woods-search-and-destroy missions that have them chomping Brussels sprouts, devastating tomato plants, and, last year, ripping up a hundred dollars worth of new strawberry plants.

We've fought back. To our initial four-foot fence, we've kept adding extensions, raising its height with taller poles, more woven wire, electric tape powered by a solar battery.

We festooned the fence with bits of cloth, empty plastic jugs. And, as you may remember, I even tried peeing along the fence line, since deer are supposed to find trace testosterone off-putting. (Me, too.)

But this year we decided to go whole-hog. Away with all the jury-rigged fencing and its tacky decorations. We'd install an eight-foot fence of sturdy welded wire, supported by mammoth locust posts.

There was an added reason for taking on the project this summer. Two close friends being married in June wedding at the Fly Creek church; their tent reception will be in our west field, just behind Anne's office.

It's probably good to host a big party every five years or so, just to make you take on your deferred jobs. Anyway, we've been thrown into a frenzy of work, trying to make the place look less like Ma and Pa Kettle's. And that old fence, our worst eyesore, just had to go.

A new fence eight feet tall called for new posts of about ten feet. And so I ordered sixteen, custom-cut. When they were delivered, I was awed by their size-and by their weight. How on earth would I wrestle them to the site and then into the post holes?

And, for that matter, how would get the holes dug? We live on a moraine; our soil is about forty percent rocks that glaciers lugged down here from northern Ontario. Digging a hole for even a small shrub calls for pickaxe and hop bar. Digging for a ten-foot locust post called for-what?

Why, a power auger, of course. Haggerty's had a two-man unit for rent, and I rented something more to go with it.

Steve Guarneri, a junior at Cooperstown High School, is a bright young man I know from the current "Greatness" project. By luck, he also has muscles and boundless energy. Steve recruited his buddy Todd Collier, and I hired the two of them for the project.

Anyone who worries about the next generation should have seen these two at work. They were dynamos-steadying the jerking, jolting, auger, then lugging over a towering post and wrestling it in place, then climbing a tall stepladder to whale away with a twelve-pound maul, then tamping rocks and soil around the base. It was hard not to clap every time they finished one.

The boys, bless them, ran out of time, but the last four holes got dug in true Fly Creek fashion. Into our yard drove Mark Weir, not on his own tractor (his universal had failed), but on Rich Votypka's. The two men had learned we needed help, and, with country kindness, they jumped right in. Mark maneuvered Rich's auger into position, and the holes were finished in a half hour. Our two hardy boys then came back and set the posts.

In another week, I'll have hung the new fencing and hammered in the last staple. The new fence, with those Pillars of Hercules posts, will be done. That's when you'll likely see me dancing in the fields again, this time in sheer relief.

Jim Atwell lives in and views life from Fly Creek. He can be found on the web at JimAtwell.com.