Milk could be twice as bountiful on our little farm at this time, but I am not willing to play Tonia’s games. Or our obstinate Toggenburg is not so much playing games as living with the fear to which she has exposed herself, and I am not going to chase and capture her in order to milk her. I know that she will be willing when her stomach is empty, and her udder is full.
Goats are the dogs of the farmyard. They are playful, intelligent, and, harmonious or discordant, the husbandman is going to have a unique relationship with each one of them. If you keep goats, they will give you stories to tell. Like when I made the goat house out of reclaimed materials and had the good fortune of finding some windows to give their home some southern exposure, and the giant buck, Sampson, could find no place better to scratch between his horns — not the many trees, not the corners of sturdy buildings — than on the brittle, ineffectual panes, destroying them all the first day.
When I was newly acquainted with goats, I wondered why they should be the image used to represent those who were separated from Christ in the last judgment. I haven’t owned sheep but have been around them enough to see how much less fun they are than goats. They seem half-witted by comparison. We’ve kept goats long enough now for me to see why they serve as a better image of rebelliousness than sheep. My conviction that goats will have it as their life’s aim to destroy whatever nice thing I am doing for them makes me understand. I may have gained some solidarity with Christ’s pastoral listeners.
The ducks, rabbits, chickens, and cats live free lives on our homestead, Herman’s Little Bluebird. The goats are free but radical. Whenever we leave the island, I expect and accept that there will be a “farm adventure”: something has gone wrong (and that is nearly always because of the characteristically inquisitive and meddlesome goats). When we took our second son, Elisha, to college in August, that adventure led to Tonia spending two nights alone in the woods, away from her herd and at the teeth of the wild.
We use electric fencing to contain our two does in a 180’ by 180’ paddock. It has worked for nine years because, when they were young, they’d been shocked a few times and stopped testing or challenging the fence. And why would they need to? They get a protein-rich grain with molasses and nutrient-dense hay twice a day, and the paddock is large enough to always have some grass or broadleaf to browse. Every spring, however, the new buckling and doelings bring the legitimacy of the fence into question as they are not trained to it and a period of mostly-free passage exists. The fence pulses and any animal moving quickly has a good chance of getting through unshocked. Spritely kids have no trouble doing exactly that.
In the six months that we keep the kids, they eventually become trained to avoid the fence. I don’t worry about it because when they do escape, they simply wander the outside of the fence line showing off their springy leaps and spins, headbutting each other, the cats, the rooster — whatever comes near enough — eating the extra-long grass, and just generally being really adorable. But for no reason that I can discern, their untrained meanderings changed something in Sonia, the alpha-nanny, this year.
Tonia the Toggenburg goes wherever Sonia the Saanen does. Or close to it. When Sonia began “letting herself out”, she stayed near the fence as the kids do, and Tonia wandered in tandem from the inside of the fence. Her habituation to the fence remained intact. But as Sonia began to wander further into the green buffet, Tonia’s impulse to be close to Sonia became stronger than her respect for the fence. The two began to exit the fence together. This would happen for a day or two then I would repair the fence, hold Sonia’s nose to it (yes, shocked along with her), and she would respect it for a few days (consequently, so did Tonia). This was the new pattern.
We began to lock Sonia in the goat house after the evening milking so that we didn’t have to go out before bed and bring the girls back into the paddock. They’d likely “let themselves in” for safety’s sake — being nearer Andre, their guardian dog, and further from the yipping, cackling coyotes — but every exit and entry stresses (and frequently snaps) a wire or two. But if Sonia was locked up there was no need to worry about Tonia. Until there was.
Two days before the beginning of our trip off-island, Tonia let herself out of the paddock in the evening after Sonia had been locked up. It was odd. It was getting close to dusk. Micah brought her in and locked her up, too. It didn’t happen the next night. Then we left. The morning after our first night was gone, everything was fine, but after the second night was gone, the guy who does the chores in our stead texted to say that Tonia was nowhere to be found. I figured that she would wander back from whatever part of the field she moseyed to. Either that or she would come to our voices when we returned later that day.
We returned home in time for evening chores. First, we walked the field and the woods. Nothing. No Tonia, no fur, no worse. No calls from neighbors, no posts on the Forum or Facebook. I really thought that the coyotes must’ve run her down. One winter, we saw a deer to which that happened plunk down in our front yard, barely alive. It was an awful, bloody scene between breakfast and school. There was no snow this time to slow the animal, but this was a domesticated goat with half a gallon of milk in her bag. It would swing as she ran and cause her legs to splay. She couldn’t outrun anything.
The next morning, no Tonia. Later that day, Tonia. And she was spooked. She was edgy like the day we got her when the farmer had to corral the nervous, racing heard — when she leaped out of my arms and sprinted across a highway — when she almost died of heat exhaustion because she wouldn’t stop trying to get away from Andre as he tried to acquaint himself with his new charge.
Every spring, after a few months of not producing milk or being milked, Sonia gets right back to the procedure because she loves it. She gets to free-feed while having all of that weight and pressure relieved. She sometimes gets lovey-dovey and nuzzles the shoulder or ear of the person milking her (often accompanied, though, by a sneeze from a face filled with feed). Tonia has to start from scratch like she’s never done this twice a day for eight or nine months. Every year. This was her eighth year being milked and it began with the same dance, only to return, again, to an act of compliance from the pest. But ever since being startled by whatever nature showed her after whatever tempted her away from the safety of the paddock and its polar bear-like sentry, she has been panicked.
Some days Tonia comes to the gate to be milked after Sonia, but more often, she vigorously eludes us. Not even our usual start-of-season tricks work. And we are not going to chase her down in the dark before school. She can deal with it. We, too, can exercise will. If the memory of whatever she saw or heard out there is more powerful than the lure of unrivaled feeding on a sweet mix and getting some scratches along the spine, well, that’s where we are. I can really understand how using goats as an image of the cursed makes perfect sense. I have no qualms with our Lord’s example.
I do have some qualms with myself, however. An animal cannot actually be foolish or wise, selfish or generous, wicked or kind. I don’t think so, anyway. Tonia doesn’t make choices like I do. Whatever “will” might mean in an animal, it is that which makes goats both enjoyable and obnoxious. Both of those kinds of experiences are, of course, dependent on whether they are behaving in consonance with my will. How often do I act in dissonance with God’s will! I have ventured from the paddock and learned how vulnerable I am. I have led myself away to be wounded by fear. I have hesitated in accepting the goodness offered me. I’ve desired the foods “out there” and not fed on the sweetness before me. I’ve lugged my burdens too long. Thank God that He is so longsuffering.
I am still not going to chase Tonia down, though.
Recent Comments