Goat Musings, Part 2

About the goats and other uses we put our pasture to

We had two goats. Cookie, the big white Alpine with black and brown markings, was the mean and willful one. Carni, a Togenburg, was chocolate brown, small, patient, and good natured, or maybe just cowed by Cookie.

Cookie had to be milked first—her rule, not ours. If we tried to get Carni out of the pen first, Cookie would butt her out of the way. She might even butt one of us. We tried to trick her, offering a nectarine or a handful of oats while slipping Carni out the gate. We tried to hold her, turn her back to the gate, or cover her eyes. No way. She was strong, insistent, and quite impossible to move when she didn’t want to. We always gave in, and so did Carni.

Cookie was also loud. If the hay feeder was empty or if the kind of hay we “served” did not please her, she would yell us out of the house and down to the pen to make things right. Difficult she was, but her milk was plentiful, sweet and rich. Besides, I liked her. I think we all liked her. Of course, we liked Carni, too, because she was easy and pretty.

This was in the early 1980s. We lived in Caldwell, Idaho. It’s a farm town, but our Canyon Hill neighborhood wasn’t exactly rural. Pughs still farmed across the road from us, but on our side of the street it was houses with two-car garages and lawns and people who had either given up farming or had never done it, like us. Two houses on the block had a pasture in back, ours and one other. We found out we had grandfather rights attached to the land, so we decided to use the pasture.

It’s why we moved to Idaho, so we could do some farm work—on a very small scale. We built a chicken coop and had our own eggs for a while. Wayne cultivated a garden spot, and we loved what that provided for us. We planted fruit trees and raspberries, and we raised a few steers.

The time I had to chase a full-grown steer down an icy street while I was eight and a half months pregnant was the last time I ever wanted the convenience of raising our own beef. We turned to goats, not for eating, but for the milk and for our children, for their character and their souls.

I wonder what they might say about that.