Some Things I Miss...

Some things I miss from my previous life:
Two goats
Ten hens
Nine garden beds
Four apple trees
A sloping hay field
A tumbledown stone wall
A swamp
The woods behind the house, and the thrush that sang in them
The imprint of fawn hooves on the driveway in mud season
The squeaky-door song of the phoebes at dawn
The frogs in the frog pond
The black bear at the bird feeder
The ermine in the garage
The milking pail, the cheese press
The me who believed she could keep it all going.

(photo by Alison Cobb)

More Confessions Of A Milkmaid

It was Christmas Day when I gave up milking my goats because of terrible pains in my shoulder. It took a lot for me to reach that decision. After all, things were going swimmingly in the goat house: the babies had just gone to a wonderful home and I was getting almost two quarts/day from Blossom, their mother. For a Nigerian Dwarf goat, that is a lot of milk--and what milk it was, rich, sweet, full of protein and fat. My city-bred grandchildren, who were staying with us during the holidays, were drinking the stuff as fast as Blossom could make it, and the one adult in the family who puts cream in her coffee was happily using Blossom's milk instead.

But Blossom, as I have explained, was a demon milker, and each encounter on the milking stand required much bending and twisting and holding and forcing and sweating, not to mention actual milking, on my part. It hurt so much that I finally quit.

I stopped feeding the goats grain (I gave them all the hay they wanted) and that and the cold weather helped them to stop producing almost immediately. At the moment, then, I don't have dairy goats. I have, it pains me to say it, pet goats.

Why does it pain me to keep goats, especially these adorable tiny goats, as pets? I don't know. All I can say is that I have a compulsion to have only farm animals that are productive, that feed us, that eat our grass (though mostly they eat hay I buy at the store) and our pumpkins and turn them into milk, or in the case of the hens, into eggs. I have a vision of the cycle of nature being reenacted on our bit of land, and the goats need to be participants rather than spectators.

For the moment, however, Blossom and Virginia Slim are dry. In the mornings I take them a bucket of water spiked with cider vinegar, give them a handful of grain, open their door to the outside, replenish their hay and bid them have a good day. I'm back in the house in no time. There's no milk to strain, no milk pail and strainer to wash. Same thing in the evening. I miss the milking and it's not that much trouble, really, but...it's awfully nice not to have to do it.

Goat On A Date

Sweet Alsiki went on a date today. This was not a spur-of-the-moment thing, but a highly orchestrated affair, like the betrothal of a Renaissance princess. Alsiki is not the most beautiful of my goats, but she is the one people fall in love with. She'll come and stand next to you, so quietly and unobtrusively that next thing you know you've got your arms around her and she's lying on your lap. She is subtly colored, cream and white, and she wears “goat jewelry,” a pair of little bell-like wattles that hang from her neck.

The date began with a hormone shot. At almost twenty months old, the biological clock is in full swing for Alsiki. But she had never given overt signs of heat—no tail wagging, no restlessness, no crying out in the night for her phantom lover, no pinkness or swelling or discharge in the relevant parts. To get things rolling, we gave her an injection that would bring her into heat within three to seven days.

Alsiki got her shot on Friday, and this morning we had an appointment with a buck at the farm where she was born, a couple of hours' drive from where we live (good breeders of Nigerian Dwarf goats are few and far between. Here is a great one: www.willowmoonfarm.com).

I thought that it might help if Alsiki looked her best. I put her on the milking stand and she let me pick up each of foot and cut the overgrown parts of the hoof with nary a kick or a struggle. (By contrast, Virginia Slim, and especially Blossom, left me sweating and panting for breath as well as covered in hoof parings.)

I thought I should also give Alsiki a good brushing. But there's no such thing as brushing a single goat. When they see me with the brush, my goats get as close to me as they can and stand quietly for as long as I am willing to brush. This has an amazing hypnotic effect, not just on them, but on me. By the time I'm done, I feel as if I've just undergone a powerful meditative experience.

We hoisted the made-over Alsiki into the dog crate in the back of the truck, and took off for the frozen north. She was not giving any signs of heat. It might take days for the shot to take effect, but the breeder had kindly offered to keep her until she did go into heat, so we weren't worried about making the trip in vain.

It was a cold, gray day, the woods and fields covered with snow, the bare trees outlined in black, like you see in paintings by Brueghel. At the farm, we decanted Alsiki into a stall and the breeder led in the boyfriend—a beautiful young buck, about Alsiki's age, black and white with a swishy mane along his back that gave him the look of a Colobus monkey. (You'll be glad to know that Nigerian Dwarf bucks, whether because of their small size, or because it's a gift of the fairies, give off nowhere near the stink of “regular” bucks during rutting season.)

The boyfriend tiptoed in, shaking his mane, tactfully keeping his distance, lifting his upper lip and darting his tongue to determine how things stood.
As I said, until that moment, there had been no signs that Alsiki was even remotely in the mood. “Strange,” I said, observing the low-key scene, “she's not trying to get away from him.” (I'd seen does who were just not quite in the mood climb up walls to get away from a buck.)

And as I finished the sentence, the boyfriend mounted and the deed was done. Just like that. Not only had Alsiki been in heat, she'd been in “standing” heat, which is as hot as a goat can get. But, discreet as ever, she hadn't wanted to make a fuss.

The boyfriend retreated, Alsiki continued to stand, in case there was more to come. The boyfriend nickered and hung about near the relevant parts. He capered and curled his lip, stuck out his tongue. Alsiki stood politely, waiting for him to recover. We knew he would, so, leaving them to their privacy, we all went out to lunch.

Saturday Morning Delights

The weather changed overnight from chilly to warm and muggy. It's not my favorite kind of weather, but it's perfect for trimming goat hooves, because the humidity softens them.

Goats who spend their lives scampering over rocks in Mediterranean countries never need pedicures: the stony soil acts like emery board on their hooves. Goats who spend most of their time on soft hay need frequent help with their feet.

I am a great believer in doing tasks such as weeding, dog- nail clipping and goat-hoof trimming often enough that they stay manageable. This time, however, what with gardening and herding and company, the hooves had gotten out of hand.

I found this out the minute I put sweet Alsiki on the milking stand and picked up her hind foot. The tip of the hoof had grown long and narrow, making her look like she was wearing pointy-toed high-heeled shoes. I pinned my hair out of my face, grabbed the hoof shears, and went to work.

And it was hard, hot work. Bending over a short, squirming creature is hard on the back. Holding on to a small hoof even as its owner tries to climb the wall is hard on the arms. Cutting off the non-essential parts of that small jerking hoof without causing major bleeding is hard on the brain. And that was just sweet Alsiki, the calmest of the herd.

Next came Blossom, who, halfway through her pregnancy, is almost as wide as she is tall. I put grain in a dish on the stanchion to distract the goats from what is happening to their hooves, but ever-hungry Blossom would have none of it. The whole trauma was made worse by the fact that when she went out of sight, the other two set up a wailing chorus of “Where have you gone, Blossom, beloved sister? Alas, will we ever see you again?” and so on. Her great belly, which made me even more aware of the need to be gentle, didn't seem to affect her squirming ability one bit.

By the time it was Virginia Slim's turn, sweat was running down my face and the hoof shears kept slipping in my hand. I was covered in goat debris: hair, bits of hay, and hoof trimmings. You have to get close and personal to do this job, and your nostrils fill with the smell of the stuff you dig out of the hooves, which while not exactly foul is peculiar, and strong.

Back in their stall, the girls consoled themselves with mouthfuls of hay while I swept the milking room of hoof trimmings and other yuckies. I thought I was done when I remembered I needed to weigh some hay. I'd been advised to let them have no more than two pounds of hay per goat per day, lest they get fat and have trouble giving birth. But I had no idea what two pounds of hay looked like.

I went into the house, moving slowly so as not to shed any of the hoof stuff that was stuck to me, and got the bathroom scale. In the goat shed I weighed myself, trying to ignore the personal significance of the results, then picked up an armful of hay, stepped on the scale again, did the math....

There was one more goat duty left, and that was to repair my post-pedicure relationship with the girls. There is no better way to make friends with these goats than to brush them, so I did. Not that they needed it. Their summer coats are short and so shiny they look as if they've been buffed. But their spirits needed brushing, and so did mine.

I sat among them and they stood close, their eyelids drooping as I brushed and brushed. I could have stayed there all day.

Instead I went back to the house, jumped in the shower, put on clean clothes, and rushed to the computer to tell you all about it.

Got Goats!