Chapter Four

 

    

                                                CHAPTER FOUR

                                           Milk Testing in April 1991

 

   In 1991, back when I was on monthly DHIA milk testing, I wrote this column.

 

   In the spring, my monthly DHIA barn sheet is a mess. Goats are freshening and drying up continually, which means old dates on the barn sheet must be crossed out and new ones entered. My supervisor takes care of this with the help of my calendar, although my supervisor doesn’t consider the calendar a very great help.

   It’s not that the information isn’t available on the calendar. It is. Everything that happens in my barn is duly entered alongside the date in the appropriate one-inch square, including which sheep lamb when with how many eyes and rams, which goats kid when with how many does and bucks, when who is dried, when who is wormed, who is treated for whatever, what sort of wild ducks are on the pond that day, the Gettysburg Address (if I happened to be trying to relearn it), etc. Some days are pretty crowded.

   Add to the crowding my less-than-perfect handwriting (some would say illegible) and you have, according to my tester, a giant headache. Or she has a headache after trying to decipher the mess.

   On March test day, my supervisor asked what day I had dried Cha Cha.

   “Just look for her name on the calendar somewhere in February,” I told my tester.

   After some moments of squint-eyed head scratching, Bev said, “Aha! Here she is! ‘Burped and fry-treated Cha Cha’.”

   “Huh?!” I asked, puzzled. So I looked. There, in plain letters, I had written “bumped and dry-treated Cha Cha”. Plain to me, anyway. To Bev it looked like “burped and fry-treated”.

   Before I dry my does, I “bump” them. That is, I press up on the right side of their abdomen, just in front of the udder, to see if I can feel kids kicking. If I feel kids, I infuse the udder with a dry treatment and quit milking the doe. If I don’t feel kids, I keep milking until the kids make themselves felt or until the doe looks obviously pregnant.

   Coco was obviously pregnant. She freshened with three kids. On the next test day my tester searched through the squigglings on my calendar trying to find Coco’s fresh date.

   “This must be it,” she said. ‘Coco feast 2 bid’. Or maybe ‘fcash 2 bid’. ‘Past 2 bid’? Were the two of you playing poker?”

   What the calendar said was “Coco fresh 2b 1d”, which obviously means Coco freshened with two bucks and one doe.

   After that my supervisor really got into the spirit of the thing. “Ah, I see Gentian freshened with one smashed fly buck and one hieroglyphic smashed fly doe.”

   There was, of course, a perfectly reasonable explanation. When my sheep lamb, I use the biological symbols for male and female (the little circles with a cross on the bottom for female or an arrow out the top right for male) to denote rams and ewe lambs. This is to keep from confusing sheep lambings with goat freshenings.

   I had mistakenly used symbols at first for Gentian’s kids, then crossed the symbols out and replaced them with “b” and “d”. Gentian had 1b & 1(+1)d. That is, one live buckling and one live doeling (plus another doeling born dead). The crossed-out symbols were Bev’s smashed flies.

   My supervisor next scoured the calendar for clues about Phaedra’s dry date. “Here she is!” (Bev was having a great time by now.) “’Phaedra fried and fly-treated.’”

   “That’s ‘dried and dry-treated,” I corrected.

   “Nope. It’s definitely fried and fly-treated. I’d swear to it.”

   I glared at her, but it didn’t do any good. She kept right on giggling.

   “Please,” I admonished between clenched teeth, “write Phaedra’s dry date on the barn sheet.”

   “Oh sure. Sorry.”

   She wrote, but I could hear little muffled giggles. Then she turned back to the calendar. “It says here you’re supposed to burp Vanessa today. Have you done that yet? How do you get her on your shoulder? Ha! Ha! Ha!

   “And next week you need to ‘fry Snowdrop if burped’. I guess she wouldn’t taste good full of gas, would she? Ha! Ha! Hee! Hee! Hee!”

   I would get a new tester, one who shows more respect, but I have been advised that anyone else would throw up their hands in disgust rather than try to decipher my calendar.

Chapter Three

 

                   A 1990 VETERINARIAN STORY

 

 

   Veterinarians are strange people. They get excited over the oddest things. This spring, I had my first ever case of milk fever. My vet had never seen a goat with milk fever, either.

   “Yes, sir, looks like a classic case. How about that! See? Her eyes are dilated and don’t contract with light. Well, what do you know. My professor told me goats were resistant to milk fever.”

   My vet acted thrilled to have proven his prof wrong. I just wanted him to save my goat. Ilsa had seemed fine when she freshened with three big kids. I’d turned her out with the herd the next day – sooner than usual because her kids were so big and sturdy and I needed her kidding pen for another about-to-pop doe.

   I worked in the barn most of the day, and didn’t think it odd that Ilsa was out in the pasture grazing, while her mother stayed by the barn babysitting everybody else’s kids. Lots of grandmas get stuck with that job.

   I didn’t even spark when Ilsa came in later and would have nothing to do with her babies. I thought she was just being cantankerous, so I locked her in a pen and made her let them eat. When I milked that night, Ilsa was lying down and didn’t want to get up. I thought she just didn’t want three babies poking at her. Not that I blamed her, but they needed to eat, so I got her to her feet. She staggered forward and collapsed.

   Panic stricken, I ran for the house and telephone. “Sounds like milk fever,” the vet on call said. “Can you load her up and bring her in?” Johnny and our teenaged son were home so I said yes. Four-year-old Ilsa weighs a ton, I’ve now decided. My husband says she’s closer to 175 pounds. Whatever, the three of us had all we could do to carry her to the van.

   I sat in the back with Ilsa, cradling her head and muttering profuse apologies for not realizing she was in trouble, while Johnny drove the 30 twisty mountain miles to the vet’s office. I get car sick very easily, and by the time we reached the vet’s I was feeling as bad as Ilsa.

   The vet, however, was in a fine mood. “I can’t be sure without tests, but there’s no time for those, and this acts like milk fever in cows. She’s just a little Jersey, isn’t she? Heh, heh.”

   Nauseous and worried, I found it hard to share his cheerfulness. The vet hooked up the IV and started running a calcium mix into Ilsa’s veins. While watching her respiration rate and heartbeat, he chattered about this and that.

   Suddenly, Ilsa belched – a great, rolling belch that went on and on.

   “Hooray!” shouted the vet. “Hear that? That’s wonderful.” Ilsa, as though warming to the praise, belched again and again. By now the vet was practically leaping up and down with joy and I began to think we had taken our goat to a lunatic.

   Seeing the look on my face, he laughed. “Vets are weird people. We love hearing animals with milk fever belch. It means their muscles are working again. When the calcium drains from their system, they can’t urinate, defecate, or belch. To us vets, a belch is beautiful music.”

   About then, Ilsa let out another chorus of sound. This time, it sounded good to me, too.

   After a few minutes, the vet encouraged Ilsa to stand, which she did, and promptly pooped on my shoe. “Great!” he exclaimed. Then she peed, and I jerked my foot back. The vet hollered, “All right! She’s not ketotic anymore! See? It didn’t turn purple.”

   I’ve seen people less excited over sitting down to a steak dinner than this guy was to seeing a pill that didn’t change color when he drenched it in urine.

   That was several weeks ago and Ilsa is fine. I’m not so sure about the vet.

   But he’s really no different from one of his colleagues, who tried years ago to teach me how to identify internal parasites. That vet had slides of lots of parasites, a chart and names. I looked through his fancy microscope and saw – little round things.

   “Look here!” he beamed. “Here are some liver fluke eggs!”

   I looked and saw – little round things, that looked just like all the other little round things.

   “Isn’t this a great microscope?!” he enthused.

   “Yeah, great,” I agreed. With it, you could see all the little round things you’d ever want to see. How you’d tell them apart remained a mystery.

   But in an effort to check the effectiveness of my worming treatments, I bought a flotation kit and a book called “Veterinary Clinical Parasitology.” In that book, I learned the truth.

   “Because of the similarity in egg morphology of a number of the gastrointestinal nematodes of cattle, sheep and goats in North America, it is difficult to identify the worm by a fecal examination.” Boy, I’ll say. In even smaller letters at the bottom of the page: “note: Cattle, sheep, and goats in North America harbor 27 species of gastrointestinal nematodes, the eggs of which are similar in morphology.”

   Yeah. They’re all little round things that look identical. Maybe with enough experience I could learn to tell them apart, but I doubt I’d ever get as excited about finding a liver fluke as my vet, so I took my fecal samples to him. It was fun to watch him hop about. “Oh, boy! Lookee here! A coccidium oocyst!”

 

Chapter Two ...What's in a Name?

 

 

   One problem with raising goats forever is you run out of names. That happened to me long ago. So periodically I ask the readers of my Kidding Pen column in United Caprine News for help. I did so when I was in a quandary over D-Anne’s doelings. As always, the goat community came through with about a jillion names.

  Margo Paul of Colorado, Melinda Tucker of Oklahoma, Caroline Lawson from Texas, and Sue Rucker out of Ohio contributed many D-Lightful names. (D-Lightful was a kid of D-Anne's from several years earlier, along with D-Ziner Jean.)

  However, the kids remained unnamed for quite some time. Not because none of the names were good but rather because I was overwhelmed by the number of excellent choices. So I continued to call the doelings "D-Stupid One" and "D-Wild Thing". "Stupid" was the one that was always crying on the opposite side of the feeder from her mom, sister and brother, because she was too dumb to walk around it. Or she went out with the herd to graze, then realized about fifteen minutes after everyone else had gone back to the barn that she was alone. D-Stupid One stood and screamed, having no clue, apparently, how she got out there.

  D-Wild Thing would probably not have been so wild if she were not being driven batty by her sister's wails. I know I was. Perhaps I should have named D-Stupid One "D-Mented". Or, as Caroline suggested, "D-Linquent".

  Caroline worked on my naming problem during her 40 milecommute to work each day and came up with two of my favorites: D-Agony and D-Ecstasy. But what if I sold D-Ecstasy and was left with only D-Agony?

  A legal secretary, Caroline also sent legal names: D-Jure, D-Minimus, D-Note, D-Novo, D-Pose, D-Facto, and D-Marche. The jury is still out on those.

   A good candidate from Melinda's list was D-Sire which I converted to D-Zire and then lengthened to D-Zirable. I could have called her Zira for short. That would definitely not have been D-Stupid One, as she was anything but desirable. Maybe D-Wild Thing could have been D-Zirable (with enough handling) and D-Stupid One could have been a D-Zaster, since she already was. Zira and Zaster. Not bad.

   Margot thought up pretty names: D-Angelina and D-Monae (or, perhaps, D-Monet). I already had an Angel line, but I really liked D-Monae. I considered naming the other one D-Matisse.

   And then there were Sue's contributions to consider, all forty-three of them. D-Tour might be good for D-Stupid One, but again it was not a terribly saleable name. My favorites from Sue's extensive list were D-Va and D-Votion. (D-Anne already had a D-Vine, which was another of Sue's names.)

   Or perhaps I could have gone French and called one of them D-Teh Moi Pourquoi, as in the song from South Pacific, "Dites Mois  Pourquoi …" ("Tell Me Why…") The song wants to know why life is beautiful. I wanted to know why this kid was so stupid. Or I could ave changed it to "Tell Me Where" (Dites Moi Ou) since she seemed to be always asking that question. "Where's Mom? Where'd everybody go?"

   "D-Teh Moi Ou" is unpronounceable, but what the hey.

   In looking through my records for that year of 2003, I see that I settled on D-Ona and D-Odora, heaven only knows why. Maybe I did not want to hurt anyone’s feelings by not selecting a name they chose. More likely, I simply forgot about the raft of suggested names by the time I got around to naming the doelings and picked whatever came into my head.

    I milked D-Anne through for several years after that before breeding her again, maybe because I did not want to have to pick a name if she had a doeling. In 2006 she produced D-Lovely, who was.

    I will spare you the “Lovely” kid names.

  _

Part One Spring Stories: Chapter One.... Hurricane Iniki

April 1993      HURRICANE INIKI

 

 

   City folks visiting often ask if all the goats in my barn have names. That seems such an odd question to me. It is like asking if all my children have names. Of course they do. Not only does each goat have a name, she also has a distinct personality, frequently matching her name. Take Iniki, for example.

   Iniki was named after the hurricane that devastated Maui last year (1992). She was named Iniki because it was the only Hawaiian word I knew, other than Nene, and Nene is her mother. Nene is Nene because I was running out of double syllable names such as Coco, Mimi, Gigi, ChaCha and ZsaZsa. All of those goats were daughter of my first double-syllable goat, Deedee. (I insist on having kid names related in some way to their mother’s name.)

   Nene is the name for a Hawaiian goose. Naturally, I decided to name all Nene’s babies Hawaiian names, only I did not know any. (Why not goose names, you ask? Well, Toulouse would be okay but Bar-headed, Barnacle, and Graylag not so much.) When the hurricane that hit Hawaii was named Iniki, I happily stored the name in my memory bank for Nene’s daughter, who arrived in January. That turned out to be a mistake.

   At first Iniki appeared to be a normally playful little goat. However, the more familiar she became with her name, it seemed to me, the more like her name she became. She is now a whirling dervish of a goat.

   The first indication that Iniki was destined to create havoc in my barn was when she leaped on top of her mother’s back. Baby goats often play king of the mountain on their mothers when the mothers are lying down. I have never, before Iniki, had a baby balance on its mother’s back while she was standing.

   At first, I thought it was cute. Nene never did. She walked and twitched and circled, trying to unseat the little brat. But Iniki has excellent balance. Not until Nene, in desperation, took off at a full gallop did her passenger leap sideways, twisting joyfully in midair before alighting.

   This has become Iniki’s favorite game. Poor Nene will be standing peacefully with her head buried in hay when the little hurricane takes a flying leap and lands atop her mother, pirouetting to face first the tail, then the head, then back again, while Nene’s tender back is ground to a painful pulp. When Nene can stand it no longer, she pulls her head out of the manger and crowhops until Iniki slips and slides to the ground.

   Fortunately for Nene, Iniki spends part of the day eating and sleeping… and getting into other sorts of trouble. One morning she was racing up and down the barn aisle, where she is not supposed to be, trying (or so I thought) to get back in with the other goats. I opened the gate at the end of the aisle and let her through.

   Iniki raced past her mother, who had been frantically pacing the other side of the fence, and darted to the fence on the far side, where she squeezed through a hole and into the pasture with the pregnant does. She promptly began running up and down that fence line as though trying to get back with her mother. Poor Nene ran toward her mischievous daughter and began calling and pacing once again.

   After a time, Nene gave up and went back to the hay manger. Iniki immediately ran to the hole in the fence she had squeezed through and squeezed back again. She knew perfectly well how to get into the field. She was just tormenting her mother.

   A number of kid goats were standing together, watching crazy Iniki. After squeezing through the fence, Iniki did a standing broad jump and landed on top of the kids, who scattered in every direction. She then did a capriole in midair and raced into the barn, careening off her mother’s back and dashing outside.

   Soon she had the other babies racing about, playing king of the manure pile and other wonderful games. As I watched, Iniki led the whole gang on a merry chase out into the pasture, then back toward the barn. As they sped to keep up with the flying Iniki, she led them straight toward the row of does lined up eating hay. Iniki leaped upward and landed on a back. The other kids, carried by their own momentum, did the same. Suddenly the whole barn was full of baby goats prancing on mothers’ backs.

   The fun lasted only for seconds, as the startled mothers whipped their heads out of the manger and bucked and swiveled until kids slid off every which way. But the damage had been done. For as long as I stayed out there to watch, baby goats practiced jumping on top of progressively more irritated mothers.

   Except for Iniki. She curled up in the sunshine and went to sleep. Like the eye of a storm, she was resting before tearing loose again.

   I recently bought a Hawaiian dictionary so I could find names for Nene’s kids next year. I looked up “iniki”, out of curiosity. It means sharp and piercing, such as wind or pangs of love. Next time, I’ll name Nene’s daughter Malie. Malie means calm, quiet, still and gentle.

   Iniki has taught me a lesson. Never will I name a goat something I do not want it to become, like Noisy. From now on, my goats will be named Peaceful, Mannerly, Obedient, or Serene. I have enough hurricanes.

 

PROLOGUE

 

Astute readers may have noticed that my second book in this Goat Lane series was published in 2000, yet many of the stories I’m reprinting were written before that. So why did they not appear in More Life in the Goat Lane? The reason involves a duck and an especially astute reader…

 

A DUCK IN THE MILK ROOM

 

        In the fall of 2005, a reader called to ask what month and year a certain Kidding Pen column had appeared. She said the column was about a duck in the milk room. I had absolutely no memory of such a column.

        "The duck came into your milk room and scared the goats into dropping grain on the floor," the caller prompted. "I thought that was so smart for a duck."

        I remembered we had ducks at one time. But I remembered nothing about one in our milk room.

        "Are you sure," I asked her, "that I wrote it?"

        She was sure. Her son-in-law was thinking about getting ducks and she wanted him to know how intelligent they were. She remembered my story of the smart duck in my milk room and wanted to give him a copy of that column.

        I didn't remember a thing. And, frankly, I did not believe I had ever written such a story. If I had ever owned a duck smart enough to write about, surely I would remember it.

        But I promised I would look through my computer and clips to see if I could find anything. And I did look. But I did not find it. The computer only had the previous several years’ worth of columns because of hard drive crashes in the past.

        But I had all my columns clipped out. Somewhere. Or at least I thought I did. They should have been in a box in my office. I went through all of those but none had anything to do with a duck in the milk room or elsewhere.

        And then I forgot all about it.

        Fast forward to February, 2006, when I was sorting photos on top of the photo file cabinet in my husband's study. I was trying to empty that room so we could tear it apart and rebuild from the ground up. The floor underpinnings had disintegrated and the file cabinets had been leaning at a heart-stopping angle. Any moment, I had been sure, they would keel over.

        So I moved the cabinets upstairs to my office, which is over a part of the house where the floor is not atilt. Before the photo cabinet could be moved, though, the foot-deep pile of stuff on top had to be sorted. In that foot-deep pile I found one United Caprine News issue. Only one. From November of 1993. Why it was there I had no idea. Since reading old columns is more fun that sorting, I stopped to read what I had written so long ago.

        To my utter amazement, the Kidding Pen story in that November, 1993, issue was about a duck in the milk room. "Clean-Up", as I apparently called her, learned to quack to make the goats throw their grain on the floor so she could eat it. I remembered it all clearly then: the duck that routinely snuck into the milk room whenever I opened the door, the quacking, the startled goats and the cascade of grain as they threw their heads up. That duck had even learned to quack at the door to be let back outside. But I never would have remembered without rereading it.

        California goat breeder Laura Donham, (for that is who the caller with the incredible memory was), had read the story twelve years before and remembered it in detail.

        My memory, I confess, is so poor that I have to look back through my last several columns to see if I have already written about a particular incident or not. Next time, I vowed then, I would just call Laura.

        After finding the lone UCN, I stood beside the file cabinet looking around to see if there were more of them somewhere in the vicinity. Next to the file cabinet location is a floor to ceiling bookcase. Well, the bookcase is not quite to the ceiling. The top shelf is open and, as my gaze went to the top, there they were: stacks of forgotten United Caprine newspapers, patiently waiting to have The Kidding Pen cut out and filed in the upstairs clipping box. They were yellowed and dusty. Obviously old.

        One could easily have fallen and landed on top of the photo cabinet and been subsequently buried under other stuff. But why that particular issue?

        I called Laura.

        "You're not going to believe this," I told her. "But I found the duck column."

        She was delighted. And asked for the month and year. She must keep the columns somewhere handier than I do because she said she would be able to find it by the date, although it "would take awhile". (I'll bet not twelve years.)

        After locating all the long-forgotten columns on top of the bookcase, I thought I might be able to put out another book. Although I swore I would not put out another book until I could tell about my new barn. I wanted a picture of my new barn on the cover: the new barn I had been talking about for ten or twenty years -- that I still did not have in 2006.

      And probably would not have, I realized, for a good long time: a tree fell across our well house that winter and smashed the roof, moving rebuilding the well house to #1 on the list. My falling-in house had moved down to #2. (But I still had high hopes of at least emptying the rooms that needed to be rebuilt.) The new barn was a distant #3. I was not sure a new barn was on my husband's list at all.

     Fast forward to 2012, the year we built the new barn. The well house that we rebuilt in the summer of 2006 was made of split-faced concrete blocks. I thought it was beautiful. So beautiful that I insisted on a foundation above-ground of split-faced concrete blocks for my new barn. And so it has.

     Our house is still falling apart, but I have a beautiful new barn. And, when I started this Still Life in the Goat Lane book project, I discovered, after reading the duck story, that I still had that stack of old United Caprine News papers on top of the bookcase. So this book contains some of the columns from that long forgotten stack, columns pre-new goat barn, columns that should have found their way into the second Goat Lane book.