Chapter Seven Spring Dreaming

 

March 1999         Spring Dreaming

 

     I have a recurring dream. This is a good dream, not a nightmare. In this dream there is a long row of immaculately clean kidding pens with metal mesh sides. The water buckets are hung outside the pens with head holes for does to reach through.

     In this dream I am standing by one pen with my hand holding a gate open as a large, pregnant doe walks calmly in. She goes directly to the metal-rack hay feeder with a ledge below it for spilled bits and begins eating.

     There are no other goats in sight, yet the doe is not screaming and demanding to be let back out. There are not fourteen other goats all trying to force their way through the gate together. The doe does not ever, much less in her first fifteen minutes in the pen, poop in her water bucket.

     The contrast with my dream and reality is striking. First of all, I only have two kidding pens, not a line of them. One can be, with considerable effort and not very effectively, divided in two if necessary, making a total of three pens which, during kidding season, are often double occupied with a makeshift barrier between goats.

     My pens are made of wood; the mangers are keyhole feeders that the kids quickly learn to inhabit. Water buckets hang in the corners, usually with a few fresh nuggets of goat poop floating on top.

     When a goat is about to kid, I grab her and drag her to the kidding pen while she struggles to go back to the dirtiest corner of the barn she can find to drop her kids. Finegan, the youngest livestock guardian dog, is leaping about excitedly, licking her rear end and causing her to try to turn and bash his brains out.

     As soon as I get the gate open, the rest of the herd comes up to see what is so great about this pen and pushes their way in first. Or they try to and get stuck in the doorway.

     I let go of the pregnant doe to chase everybody else out. She lumbers back to her dirty corner and begins circling, then lies down. Finegan bounces some more and licks her nose. She gets up and bashes him. I retrieve her, lead her to the pen again, screaming epithets at the unruly mob waiting for the gate to reopen.

     Eventually, I get her and only her in there. She stands at the gate and screams indignantly. Finegan goes off to lick other rear ends. The herd scatters. The cloistered doe screams louder.

     Even though I try to spread the breedings out, the does scrunch their kiddings together so I often have another goat going through the same pawing-the-filth-off-the-floor routine in another corner of the barn. Finegan bounces from doe to doe.

     If all three pens are occupied, I have to try to subdivide one. There is not really enough room for a hugely pregnant doe in one half of my kidding pens. The does spend all their time trying to kill each other across the top of the barrier.

     After their kids are born, the kids invariably find a way to switch sides and then stand with the wrong mother, screaming for food while the wrong mother tries her best to stay away from them while hunting frantically for her own children.

     It would seem after all these years that I would have a better system. When we build our new barn I will. I will have a line of immaculately clean metal kidding pens with water buckets outside. There will be an aisle way between the herd and these pens, so I don’t have so much “help” when I’m trying to put a doe in a pen. The feeders will be kid proof.

     There will be lots of kidding pens, so I’m not kicking out does and kids that are one day old to quickly clean the pen and move another freshening doe in. Presently I spend much of my days cleaning kidding pens. I like to leave the does and their kids in there for three days. The pens must be cleaned each of those three days because it is a small space and newly fresh does are very poopiferous. And their kids produce incredible quantities of urine.

     You may wonder why I leave kids with their dams. There are advantages. I would love to share these advantages with you except, at the moment, I can’t think of any.

     Kids with their moms quickly become kids in the feeders. They soon forget the tender nurturing they had at birth from me and become wild things, unable to be touched.

     A year later, when they are six weeks from producing children themselves, I run them down and drag them to the milk stand for grain. It takes days before they realize that the milk room is a Good Place not a Place To Be Feared. By then, I’m exhausted and ready to swear off goat raising.

     As soon as yearlings freshen however, they become just as unafraid as their mothers. They fight for position at the milk room door and run me over if I’m in the way. Most of them. The others, the ones with the gorgeous udders and bodies, stay terrified and have to be dragged into the milk room twice daily.

     In my dream, yearlings march into the milk room as sedately and calmly as the older does. They jump on the milk stand willingly and stand perfectly and politely motionless while I milk.

     The kids in my dream do not climb into feeders. They have adorable little cubby holes that they prefer. They do not run away from me but neither do they jump on me and butt for milk, like bottle babies.

     During kidding season, I can’t wait to fall into bed at night and dream.

 

 

2017: We have a new barn. But there are four kidding pens, not a whole line of them, one of which is also, at times, a calf pen. And, at times, another one is a creep pen for the kid goats. There is no aisle between the kidding pens and the milkers’ area. The pens are wood, not metal, and the water buckets hang inside the pens and need to be emptied and cleaned daily or twice daily… or more… when occupied.

  But each pen has a lovely outdoor space with high, goat-proof fencing around and between them. (Or as goat-proof as any fencing can be.) And I have mostly solved the problem of lack of space by breeding very few does. This year, I bred none. And no buck escaped.

   First fresheners, though, are as obnoxious as ever.

 

Chapter Six An Overprotective Mother

 

 I have these chapters in various orders on the computer so who knows if this is really Chapter Six in the final version, but it seems appropriate for this time of year. I just had 3 does kid and one must be a reincarnation of the doe in this story...

 

 

AN OVERPROTECTIVE MOTHER

    

     April, 2005: Although most of my goats prefer to have me holding their hooves (figuratively speaking) when they kid, D-Anne is the exception. She is a very large, very friendly doe who turns into a witch when she becomes a mother.

     This year, she did not appear very close to kidding on her due date, so I gaily went off to do whatever I was doing that day without moving her into the kidding pen. I guessed it would be a week before she popped. My first doe of the year had been a week late so I assumed all the others would be, too. Stupid assumption.

     That afternoon, while I was working in the orchard, two friends came by unexpectedly to drop some stuff off for me. They walked by the goat barn to reach the orchard. "I see you have new kids," Carol said.

     "I hope you don't mean brand new kids," I said. "The youngest are two weeks old."

     "Well, the doe has something hanging out of her back end. I assumed it was afterbirth and the kids were just born."

     I tore off for the barn and there was D-Anne with two mostly dry buck kids and one dead doe kid who never made it out of the sac. D-Anne was busy trying to kill every other goat in the vicinity. I picked up the live kids and led D-Anne by the collar into the kidding pen. As I dipped the navels in iodine, D-Anne attacked.

     I managed to dodge her charge and hollered at her. Then I grabbed the board I use to block the opening into the outside area when the babies are first born. D-Anne clobbered the board. Since I did not have the kidding pen ready, I retrieved the manure shovel and cleaned out the slightly soiled straw. D-Anne butted the shovel. I was glad to have her concentrating her protective efforts on an inanimate object instead of me.

     For the first several days, I had to tie D-Anne up before I could do anything with her children. It's the rare doe that makes pulling kids and bottle-feeding seem the easiest thing to do but D-Anne is such a doe, at least at the beginning. After a few days she mellows out -- with me. But woe be the water bucket that dares to enter her pen.

     When I turned D-Anne and the babies out with the herd, she proceeded to challenge everything that came within a country mile of her precious children. Her precious children, however, did not stay in one place waiting to be protected, which drove her nuts. Fortunately, D-Anne loves to eat and seems to forget her duty to kill every goat that looks at her kids when her own head is buried in hay. Nor does she hesitate to desert them entirely and charge into the milk room twice daily for her grain. Or more often if she can get away with it.

     A few days ago, D-Anne's babies disappeared and she was frantic. I wasn't because I knew they were most likely under the barn. A board is off in one spot and very small kids can crawl in for a short distance. They ignored their mother's frantic screams. (This was the old barn, remember. The new one has no such hidey holes. Yet.)

     I peeked under and sure enough, there the two kids were, cuddled up together sound asleep. Feeling a little ornery, I didn't pull them out and give them back to their mom. Let her scream, I thought. Maybe she won't be so anxious to knock all the other goats out of the way to get into the milk room.

     Hah!

     As soon as I opened the milk room door, there was D-Anne. She called her babies between mouthfuls of food, but never stopped eating. When I let her out, she went back to dashing around hysterically looking for them. I retrieved them for her, mostly because her screaming was driving me nuts. Thankfully, D-Anne did not decide I was the evil culprit who had stolen them in the first place.

     A few other goats will try to keep me from messing with their udders when they first freshen, but most seem to consider me one of their kids and lick the slimy newborns, then me, then the slimy newborns, etc. I think they expect me to get down on all fours and nurse from their teats and are mildly surprised when I choose to use hands and a bucket.

     Only D-Anne considers me a predator at kidding, the day after she has considered me a friend and head-scratcher. But I can't take it personally. After all, D-Anne also considers boards and shovels and water buckets predators.

     D-Anne's children from past years have grown up to become normal goats at kidding, not emotionally scarred by their mother's early over-protection. Thank goodness. One goat trying to kill me at kidding time is enough.

Chapter Five Tractor Angst

 This was written a long time ago. We now have two newish tractors that usually work. At least they take turns not working... so far.

 

 

 

April 1994    TRACTOR ANGST

 

   It is a good thing I milk by hand. Johnny and I would never keep a milking machine operating. We are mechanically challenged. To illustrate, let me tell you about our relationship with tractors.

   Old Gray is an ancient Ford Ferguson that has never, in the fifteen years we have owned it, started on its own. Old Gray insists on company. Unless its battery is connected to a friend’s battery, it just sits there.

   Once started, Old Gray belches and bucks, loudly complaining and, sooner or later, dying. Sometimes we get four or five manure loads spread before Old Gray rattles to a determined stop. But that tractor is a heckuva lot more agreeable than Old Blue. Old Blue is just plain mean.

   Johnny bought Old Blue, a prehistoric Ford, half a dozen years ago because it had a bucket on the front with a hydraulic lift. “We’ll load the manure spreader with Old Blue and pull the spreader with Old Gray,” Johnny explained. “It will save us from hand loading.”

   Not once have we loaded the entire manure spreader with Old Blue. First the hydraulic hose broke, spewing hydraulic fluid all over the pasture. Once that was fixed, Old Blue quit running altogether. We hired a mechanic to fix what was ailing. He did. Said it worked fine. We didn’t get twenty feet beyond the tractor shed before it died and refused our resuscitation attempts.

   Just when we were ready to call the tractor undertaker, or whoever picks up dead tractors, Old Blue would roar into life and load half the manure spreader. We would think, “Boy this sure is easier than loading by hand. We’d better keep this tractor.” Then Old Blue would break some critical part of its anatomy and sit idle for months until we had the money, time, or fortitude to repair it.

   Last fall I was cutting the thistles out of the pasture with Old Gray when the tractor suddenly began smoking and coughing. I shut it off quickly before the whole thing went up in flames. Debris had clogged the air cooling system. After cleaning out the mess, I hiked to the barn for water for the radiator and then back to the tractor. Of course, Old Gray would not start. It was lonely.

   So off I trudged again over fields and through gates to the shed where Old Blue languished. Miracle of miracles, the cranky thing started right up. Just before we reached Old Gray, Old Blue’s hydraulic cable, which I was not using, exploded, gushing fluid all over the place. Simultaneously, Old Blue died. And refused to start.

   The two tractors were as far from the house as they could get. No tractor ever quits within easy walking distance of help.

   “That’s it,” I told Johnny. “I want a decent tractor.”

   “We can’t afford a decent tractor.”

   “I can’t afford a nervous breakdown.”

   The mechanic fixed the hydraulic line and moved both tractors to the shed, where they have been until this spring. During a break in the weather, Johnny started Old Blue and headed for the manure pile. The tractor saw that enormous pile of goat manure and expired.

   “That’s it,” said Johnny. “Old Blue is going to the auction.”

   The annual farm equipment auction is in March. We made arrangements with a neighbor to use his flatbed. Or try to.

   Old Blue was waiting in the tractor shed on the appointed day, driven there in one of its rare good moods. Now, of course, it would not start, not even with a jump from Johnny’s van. “I’ll tow it into the sun with Old Gray,” Johnny said. “It starts better after it’s warm.”

   So he tried to pull the van up to Old Gray to jump-start it as usual, but the ground was muddy and the van got stuck. As he tried to rock free, the van died. By this time, my mild-mannered husband was kicking things and hollering.

   I was in the barn, milking goats and trying to stay out of the way. Johnny trudged to the house for the car, jump-started the van and pulled it forward, where it mired down again. I left the goats for the moment and went to see if I could help.

   While Johnny jumped Old Gray from the car, I tried rocking the van back and forth. Little by little, it began to move. Then, suddenly, it shot backwards.

   Knowing the van would get stuck if I stopped, I didn’t. We leaped backwards, slipping this way and that, just missing Johnny, the car and the gas tank in the tractor shed. Careening past the barn, the van came dangerously close to sliding into the pond before finally reaching solid ground. Things were looking up.

   After hooking the tractors together, Johnny pulled me and Old Blue up the driveway. There was no time to let Old Blue warm in the sunshine; we needed to get the dang thing started and to the sale. I put it in second and let up on the clutch. Yes! The engine came alive. Johnny climbed on. Old Blue died.

   “You try it,” Johnny said in disgust. Usually the tractors cooperate much better for Johnny than for me. I am more severely mechanically challenged. But today everything seemed determined to thwart him. So I pushed the starter on Old Blue. It purred to life. Johnny sighed and took off for the neighbor’s loading ramp and flatbed, forty tractor minutes away.

   But Old Blue wasn’t through with him.

   Halfway up the loading ramp, the tractor died. Try as he might, Johnny could not get it restarted. The neighbor hooked his pickup to the front of the miserable tractor and towed Johnny all over his farm; down lanes, though pastures, round and round they went. Old Blue coughed, sputtered and lapsed into an apparently permanent silence.

   By this time, Johnny was in, to put it mildly, a very bad mood. He called our mechanic, threatening, pleading and finally driving over and picking him up. The mechanic pulled Old Blue’s choke out a fraction: the diabolical tractor roared to life.

  

   Old Blue is finally gone. Do I feel guilty for dumping the cantankerous beast on some poor soul at the farm auction? No. I’m convinced that tractor doesn’t hate everyone. Old Blue has a mean streak that makes it only pick on people who are mechanically challenged. People like Johnny and me.