Thud!! Crash!! Clatter!! Bang!! What on earth?? My usual routine is to lock the goats on our deck with their breakfast while I clean out their shed - a practice requiring a certain level of trust as I cannot see them from the yard - so when I heard all that commotion I dropped my broom and dashed for the deck. What had they broken now??
What I saw was Emerson, or rather Emerson's legs, thrashing about in an unfathomable yet frantic situation - he had apparently knocked over one of our heavy white wrought-iron chairs and then somehow gotten one of the chair legs stuck up under the cone at his neck. In his struggles the cone and his protective cloth collar (not in this photo) were now covering his face, adding to his panic at being blind and seemingly impaled on a chair leg. How many times have I told him to stay off the chairs?? I got him untangled and sat with him while he calmed down. Crazy goat!
Fast forward several hours to late afternoon and a trip to what we call "The Delicious Field." This is a weedy thicket below the house filled with scrumptious wild shrubs, poison ivy, thistles - everything the goats adore. In the past we have taken them down there for supervised snacking (they would leap in delight each time!), so recently my husband erected a fence around part of the field, enabling the goats fill their bellies unattended.
That's right - now they hate it. As soon as they realize our destination is "The Delicious Field," they cry and strain against their leashes, refusing to go anywhere near the now-fenced prison. Apparently the horror of being separated from their peoples overrides even the tastiest forage. Yesterday I dragged them down there, determined that they would learn to cope and appreciate the money we had spent on fencing. They cried as I drove off to pick up Emily from tennis practice, and were both still crying as we pulled back into the driveway later. I rushed inside to pull a casserole from the oven before going out back to bring up the sorrowful goats, but when I looked out the window - only Elliot was in the fence. How can this be? The gate is still locked - where is Emerson??
Confused,frantic, I called for my family members to help look, but apparently no one heard me. I scanned the lower fields, the garden - nothing. Would he have gone to the creek? Was he stolen? (As if I could be so lucky...) Finally I spotted him - standing plaintively in the upper driveway next to my car. I know my peoples were just here...Of course as soon as I ran to get him (only a few feet from the road), he got wily and started running off, and when I eventually caught him I had to hoist him up and carry him to the pen as I had no leash or collar with me.
"Why didn't you come out and help me?" I demanded, out of breath, of my husband, who had been sitting by the front window at the computer.
"Well, I did wonder why you were carrying him across the front yard," he answered, as though I might have been hauling about a thrashing, 63-pound animal just for fun. An investigation revealed a small gap in the fence where a determined animal could have squeezed through...so the Delicious Field is now off-limits until Mike has time to repair the fence. Or maybe forever...
No comments:
Post a Comment