Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

 

Despite enjoying more than enough opportunity to recognize the danger of preconception in any facet of life, I had thought that the crucial thing to take care of when preparing for the arrival for a billy goat would be securing the perimeter. It wasn’t totally my fault. All goats are escape artists, and the one thing the human bestower of Walt, the world’s only moose-antlered goat, told me was suspiciously paradoxical, like a sphinx’s riddle. She said, “He’s never had an aggressive day in his life (pause to pull long piece of grass out of teeth)…is your corral very secure?”

This raised a flag, and I doubled the corral’s height from four to eight feet, laid stones around perceived weak spots along the ground, and did everything short of mining the gate. Already, well before breeding time, I noticed that I spent much of my waking life these days fruitlessly trying to fence out goats, from the orchard, from the garden, and, most of all, from my roses, evidently filet mignon to the caprine palate. That battle is ongoing and now part of a long comparative study in goat versus human intelligence being sponsored by NASA: the primary question, as it was phrased in the federal funding request, is, “when there’s 41 dang acres of delicious wildflowers to eat, why do the goats go straight after Doug’s four rose bushes?”

Anyway, on the day of Walt’s arrival, I secured the corral to a height that seemed beyond (non-steroid) goat high jump Olympic records. I threw up whatever I had to create the illusion of fence height and integrity: chicken wire, surveying streamers. It worked.

But worry about keeping a billy goat in a pen with an attractive female turned out to be a classic case of the Wrong Way Of Looking At The Problem. More apt, in terms of foreshadowing, turned out the the fact that the night before Walt’s 10-day infestation of the Funky Butte Ranch, I was at a Halloween party (dressed as a goat), at the Ranch adjacent to Walt’s. The conversation was worrying. “Hey, I got chased for a mile on my bike by a weird goat with crazy horns,” a demon told me by the punch bowl. “It was life and death for a while there. I was sure that if he caught me, he’d have killed and eaten me.”

Nobody wants a billy goat. Even one that someone didn’t tragically and unsuccessfully try to de-horn, with Frankensteinian results. I should say that no one wants a billy goat…to keep. They smell, are aggressive and destructive, and they smell. Did I mention they smell? And as for aggressive/destructive? In Alaska, I jogged without fear past brown bears along the Chilkoot River nearly every day, but was terrified when I passed my neighbor George’s cabin, simply because of the chase that inevitably ensued, with me trailed closely by his feloniously horned billy goat. Even normal goat horns should have five day waiting periods. George’s goat tended to sharpen his on a spruce tree in between my runs. If you want final proof and are a regular reader of this blog, I’ll just say that a billy goat is the only animal on Earth that can make my nanny goat Melissa seem gentle.

As a result, most disappointed caprine midwives either fatten and eat male kids, or kill them as soon as they exit their mother. But there’s a problem with this tradition. You in fact need a billy goat if you want baby goats. You’d be amazed how many human mothers will ask me of my two nanny goats, “Do you have to breed them to get milk?” I don’t know if this is ignorance of mammalian anatomy or belief that everything these days can be made to occur with the right shot or genetic cloning procedure. “Didn’t you have to breed to make milk?” I ask Socratically. That usually spurs an embarrassed giggle.

But the understandable dearth of billy goats, akin to the shortage of female babies in China, means that during the fall breeding season all goat owners in southern New Mexico have to inhale their last fresh breath of oxygen, and team up to pass a miraculously procured billy around the valley’s ranches until, like in a pyramid scheme, the last person gets stuck with him. Ask any Albanian. I was determined not to be the last in the chain. So I initiated the search when my down-valley neighbor Pat said I could have Walt as long as she didn’t have to take him back. It only took a month to get a sucker, I mean a response.

Walt, the only available billy goat in my time zone, was also so disfigured in the head area that, as I transported the beast across 22 bumpy, rural miles to the FBR, a quartet of hunters in camo gaped at me enviously, thinking I had nabbed, alive (and hogtied in somewhat Guantanamo manner), some kind of mutant desert caribou (everyone is psychically bracing for these kind of effects of climate change). Other than the WMD antlers, Walt was a fine-looking, healthy, long-haired goat, probably an alpine in breed. I felt like a real cowboy during the corralling and monster truck drive back, not to a home or to a condo, but to my Ranch, except for using NRS River Straps instead of a lasso to keep Walt in the truck.

Walt didn’t try to scimitar my legs off at the knees until his second morning (two day’s swelling). By that time, he had demolished the corral shade house – a sturdy wooden-beamed structure with a metal roof — like it was a downtown Lads Vegas casino, care of the noose-like, ten-foot tether I wasn’t about to remove, even if it interfered with his pick-up moves on Natalie, the nanny I decided to breed. That tether played roughly the same role that a straight jacket does on an actively psychopathic mental patient. By the second afternoon of mating season, the corral itself looked like it had been attacked by fairly accurate war planes. Just to feed the bemused occupants, I had to flip the feeding trough upright onto some wood debris, all while dancing around like a flamenco performer as I tried to avoid the wrath of Walt’s jealousy at my presence.

I was delighted to note that Natalie didn’t seem to mind dating. (Feeling like a pimp, I nervously waited until she was over a year old to breed her, to break the chain of teen pregnancy and all its associated social problems. I still couldn’t be sure that Nat was psychologically ready for a love affair. Worryingly, the morning I picked up Walt the Moose, Nat snuggled into my lap during our morning sit, looking nothing so much as virginal. And I hated separating Natalie and Melissa. The two half-sisters had had been together nearly every minute of their lives. And they tended to bleat so loudly and incessantly when briefly apart that it raised Homeland Security alerts. The neighbors were vocally aware when this happened, usually because the wind closed a fence.)

But it turns out this wasn’t just goat lust. The two young lovers’ personalities meshed well, which is important in any relationship. Walt, despite his punk horn-do, had a lovely coat which probably kept Nattie warm at night – it was autumn at 5,400 feet. They frolicked around the corral, and all around seemed to dig each other.

Fate, alas, in the form of a cabal of crunchy New Mexican organic protein ranchers, intervened to prevent it from being a life-long joining of goat souls. In truth, Natalie seemed to get over her pushy, smelly boyfriend pretty quickly, when handed a handful of grain.

 

Still, while it lasted, the star- and horn-crossed love affair was kind of sweet. Walt’s pick-up moves were not as abrupt as one might expect. Since sex sells, I guess I’ll give a clinical description of the actual process: first Walt introduced himself by licking Natalie’s neck and nudging her almost gently with his neck – he did everything but bring her flowers. Then he bulged his eyes, stuck out his tongue, and made a sound like a 1950s television version of a demented person. Next the two goats romantically nuzzled flank to flank (with Walt, as nature’s only goat with antlers, trying not to guillotine his girlfriend). Then they mated for perhaps two and a half seconds. Rinse. Repeat. That was Day One. One thing that stood out for me was how natural all of this was. It wasn’t rape, that’s for sure. Nat was totally willing, tail switching and sometimes soliciting. As her over-protective surrogate father, I was both relieved and tempted to ground her.

By Day Two Walt was just a part of Natalie’s past. She wanted to hang out with me and her evacuated sister Melissa much more than she wanted to accept her housemate’s advances. She avoided him in the corral like Ali did Foreman in the ring. There’s a theory that says anything can stop being fun if it’s your job. Just ask a Yankees centerfielder. And thus did the honeymooners dramatically cool off, hopefully not distracted by my presence outside the fence, chanting,

Goats, can you feel it?
Love is everywhere

Fathers everywhere will relate to my subconscious satisfaction that Nat liked her old life better than her dalliance with the dating world, and I couldn’t blame her, but I wanted her pregnant. I almost brought down my saxophone to serenade the recalcitrant nanny back into the mood. Then I found out from Walt’s next victim, a helpful rancher one valley over, that this was all normal, that if she wasn’t in heat when Walt arrived, she probably would come into heat within a couple of days. Which she apparently did, based in the love fest that ensued a four days later.

Betty, my progressive rancher consultant, had a few decades of experience as a goat herder, and our discussions, as near-strangers, immediately took on a clinical but still NC-17 tone.

“She’ll smell different to him when she’s really ready,” she told me during one bizarre voyeuristic cell phone conversation. “Then he’ll get her.” “Get” being a technical verb in this case, for “fertilize.” It’s field jargon.

I think “getting” happened. I hope it did. I have no experience in this area. I’m a virgin breeder. Nat seemed to know just what to do — when to avoid Walt and when to cozy up to him. I won’t know for sure unless she starts requesting pickles, but I’m acting under the assumption that the second contusion Walt gave me as I loaded him back up on the ROAT for a pass-off that felt a year overdue – a sharp head-twisting antler whip to my not-so-funny bone (as I hopped around in agony I knew I was looking at three day’s swelling this time) – was his way of thanking me for introducing him to his all-too-brief wife. As anyone who has read a posting in the blog will know, every task on the ranch is like solving a puzzle — chess mixed with diplomacy mixed with Tetris mixed with body-building. Ranch life overall is a continual exercise in thinking on your feet – in this case figuring out how to feed two horny (in more ways than one) goats without getting gored like an insufficiently trained bull-fighter.

I pause at this point in the narrative because I smell goat stink wafting up into my offended nostrils from somewhere here at my desk. Ah, yes, I see it’s coming from my sweater. Other than the physical danger and property destruction, it is the indescribably-overwhelming and rancid smell that keeps the world’s billy goat population so disproportionately low. Everything on the Funky Butte Ranch still carries goat redolence, from a half mile away, even though Walt has been gone for nearly a week. My sheets, the sink handle, my laptop case. In this part of the world, there is a special dry cleaning service called SRSR for “Severe Ranch Smell Removal.” I don’t so much shower anymore as de-toxify. De-capricize in steaming aquifer water. And I have to do it before my afternoon shower. The other night I attended a meeting in Silver City, and from the reaction of the other, supposedly rural folks at the event (forearms clamped to faces, some vomiting politely under the table), I recognized that I probably could’ve showered and changed before leaving the Ranch.

“Sorry, I was breeding my goat this week,” I explained. “I mean, not me personally, but I was overseeing it.” I can only hope these sickened (now in more ways than one) folks will be gagging out of the other side of their mouths come spring when Natalie starts giving the organic, local, fresh daily milk that will hopefully result in Funky Butte Ranch cheese, yogurt and ice cream.

The world got very quiet when Walt left. Goats are the world’s most unflappable creatures, and the day after everything returned to “normal” at the FBR, Nat and Melissa were already getting into the roses, with the former chewing her cud post-coitally. Goats are emotional eaters: they only eat when they’re happy, excited, upset, lonely, tired and alive. So I can’t tell if Nat’s vivacious appetite for my roses is indicative of pregnancy. But I’ve marked the due date down on my calendar. And I sure hope she has girls.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

22 Responses: