I have just come back inside the main FBR ranch house, armed with (and bloodied by) a dangerous clipper weapon, from the monthly goat trimming. I love seeing these words on the screen, because they represent more TINIWES. Things I Never Imagined I Would Ever Say.
Not in non-fiction.
I can never tell which of the Goatlets will be an angel, and which will be a mischievous incarnation of Pan when I head down to the corral with the hedge-trimmer-like clippers. All I know is they’ve never both been angels at the same trimming.
This time, a chilly December evening featuring Sergio Leone winds, Natalie held out her hooves daintily like she was at the manicurist. But it was all part of a greater caprine plan. Melissa used this time to pilfer my unguarded daypack where I had the post-trimming reward grain waiting. Thus, sated as a goat can be by the time it was her turn, Melissa had no incentive to behave herself. So I had to sit on her for the trimming. Soon she’ll be too big for even that Draconian maneuver. I have no idea what she offered Natalie to be the, well, sacrificial goat for the grain theft.
Melissa, week by week, is showing me why goats are such impressive survivors. They’re not just smart, cute Houdinis. They think of their feet with split second timing. Our battle of the minds to keep her either in (from her viewpoint) or out (my preference) from my rose bushes has now cost the Funky Butte Ranch economy something like 100 hours of productivity. Every time I have a system down (the latest plan is for a multi-layered, five foot tall, penitentiary-style maze chicken wire that gives my patio hang-out area the look of a prison yard) she figures a way in.
What impresses me is the diversity of Melissa’s methods, usually while Natalie forages innocently on the live oak nearby: sometimes digging under, sometimes wiggling in between layers of fencing, sometimes using determined, repeated brute force to break the bailing wire at the fence posts I’ve knocked in at the cost of considerable sweat and blood.
This is the mantra I drone each time I yank the sated Melissa from the amazingly still-alive roses: it’ll all be worth it when I’m providing the valley with milk, yogurt, cheese and bread. And my neighbor Amanda wants to use goat milk as base for her natural paint. More on that later.
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2 Responses:
May 7th, 2007 at 11:21 am
hey i recognize that t-shirt in the first photo………wasn’t that the year you rode on my team?….”team rode hard and put away wet”
ha ha…..oliver
May 7th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Yep. I find myself an amateur student of how t-shirts age. This one, for whatever reason, can survive the basic as well as the secondary rigors of rural life: goat defecation, excessive washing and line drying, and of course lying-crumpled-in-the-back-of-the-truck-for-weeks-after-the-last-hotsprings-soak.
For those not familiar with the Kluane to Chilkat International Bike Relay to which Oliver refers, it’s a whacky tradition shared between the weirdos of Canada’s Yukon and the even Weirdo-ers of Haines, Alaska. I think the link to an NPR story I did about it is under tthe NPR link here on the Dispatches blog.
Oliver, by the way, chose the R-rated name for the team (was that really our name? What does that even mean? I mean, I perceive lots of innuendo…anyway, don’t answer. I told the Web host this is a family site. And was that the year Ramsey rode across the border in his birthday suit, yelling, “Nothing to Declare!”?)
Hope all’s great with you, O.