GoatMan

  Our host, Sepp, fires the bread oven.

  Now, I can see Sepp is not one for outbursts, so he just shifts his weight once he’s asked a few questions to confirm what I’m communicating and sits, waiting for the bread oven to heat up, stroking his beard and considering.

  “We start early,” he says.

  “That’s fine. Great!” I say. “What time?”

  “Four o’clock.”

  “OK, that’s fine, great.”

  “We go…quickly,” he says.

  “Yep, that’s OK. We’ll just try and keep up!”

  “We go down…fast.” He angles his arm.

  “Steep? Yes, it was steep on the way up. I’ll just have to work that out myself and try and keep up, and if I can’t, then obviously, that’s my problem, Sepp, you won’t have to worry about us at all.”

  “OK,” says Sepp. He bids us good night and goes in to tell the farmhand that the oven is hot enough. That’s that. We’re on.

  We’re up before dawn. Even though it’s still dark, the goats we’re sharing the barn with are waking up, too. The clanking of their bells, which had died down over the freezing night, has picked up again. They’re getting restless.

  We can hear Sepp pottering around, too, so we go out to see what’s happening. He tells us he’s going to milk the goats, then we go. He disappears into our barn.

  Sepp and Rita have a herd of about sixty peacock goats (no, the resemblance to peacocks isn’t obvious to me, either). I wonder how long it’s going to take for him to milk them all. We follow him in, and he’s getting all the goats lined up with their heads sticking out through a gap in a special fence, tempted by their breakfast. The dim dawn light in the barn is suddenly transformed as a generator sparks to life, fluorescent lights flicker on, and, in a kind of surreal flourish, “Baby Love,” the saccharine 1960s pop hit, starts blaring out of the speakers. The goats chow down, soothed by the sound of “Oooh-ah-oooh, baby love, my baby love” et cetera. Sepp and the farmhand walk up the line, attaching their sucking milking machine to the udders of each goat in turn. Simon can’t help but make jokes about Sepp attaching his milk suckers to my nipples. I’m not up for being milked. (And how would that even work, anyway? Actually, let’s not pursue that question.) But yes, I had better start goating up, because Sepp and the farmhand and the goats know the milking drill, so it’s not going to take long before they’re finished.

  Assembling my goat legs before dawn.

  Man, machine, and goat.

  I go and put on my goat suit: first my chest protector, then my “delayed-action artificial rumen,” the waterproof suit my mother made me, my energy-returning back legs, my crash helmet, and, finally, my prosthetic front limbs.

  This wasn’t the entirety of my envisioned transformative suit. There were a few bits I’d just not managed to get working, most notably my goat eyes. I’d had a few detailed exchanges with an optical engineer about how to reposition my eyes to the side of my head and widen my field of vision to that of a goat, but bending light in the ways required is not a trivial matter. The solutions were either video goggles linked to wide-angle cameras, thus requiring batteries (which I wasn’t keen on), or a system of glass prisms and lenses, which would have to be extremely large if they were to provide the 320-degree field of vision enjoyed by goats. A more compact prism system was available from a manufacturer of advanced periscopes for tanks; however, not being in the arms industry myself meant they were unwilling to engage with me, citing restrictive international law on sales of advanced military hardware. I was actually quite glad I’d not pursued goatlike eye adaptors, because I was starting to feel that I really didn’t want to mess with my vision while walking around this perilous landscape on four legs.

  Now, I’d obviously practised being a quadruped, with no end of walking round the prosthetics clinic and clomping round at home. But these had been flat and level stomping grounds, whereas the whole point of the Alps is that they’re decidedly not level. I walk out of the elevated concrete pen in which I’d been getting changed and very quickly discover that walking downhill on four legs is extremely difficult. Even the slightest negative gradient is hard work. I stumble down the slope towards the barn, straining and terrified of my front legs slipping from under me on the wet stone. Rita, having observed this short demonstration of my goat prowess, comes out of the farmhouse, visibly amused by this (let’s be honest) totally ridiculous spectacle of an Englishman finding it extremely difficult to be an Alpine goat.

  “Very good—ha, ha, ha, ho, ho, ho. But they go fast, Thomas. You shouldn’t wait. You go now, and they’ll catch you. They’re very quick down the rocky path, very excited, maybe dangerous for you if you’re in the way. You should get to the lake, where it’s flat.”

  Right, then—a head start. I set off, but Jesus, it’s hard going. Around the farm is an undulating plateau. On level or even slightly upsloping ground, I’m just about able to walk along with quite a lot of discomfort, but there’s no escaping that I’m heading in general down the mountain to the lower winter pastures. And when I’m on even a slight downwards slope, the strength required from my arms is draining. Dr. Heath and Geoff have made my prosthetics so that about 60 percent of my weight is taken through my front legs on level ground, but as the ground slopes downwards, progressively more weight is borne through my front. And lifting one front foot off the ground to take a step forwards means all that weight needs to be taken by my other arm. Really what I’m doing is one-arm press-ups down the side of a mountain. As I’m sure my girlfriend would attest, I’m almost as strong as an ox, but I realise even that isn’t going to be strong enough unless the way down the mountain involves quite a lot of going uphill.

  Rita shouts out (though she doesn’t have to shout too loud; when I look back through my legs, I can see I’ve managed to walk a depressingly short distance from the farm): “Thomas! You’re too slow! Get down to the lake! You need to be off the steep path before they come!”

  The path Rita is referring to is the one we were warned off walking up with our luggage yesterday: a steep zigzag of scree and loose boulders with a stream/waterfall gushing down the middle of it.

  Oh sweet Jesus. I’m already working up a sweat, and my knuckles, despite being enveloped in Dr. Heath’s special cushioning prosthetic silicone gel, are getting painful. I decide I need to follow Rita’s advice and get to the bottom of the narrow zigzag path before the goats come down it, as I really don’t want to be in the way of a herd of excited goats. And so I invent a new sort of semibipedal—more tripedal—kind of gait. Using a mixture of sideways on four legs/frontways tottering on two while using a third leg against the slope for stability, sometimes going backwards, sometimes going forwards, I manage to scramble down the lethal path. Just as I’m nearly to the lake at the bottom, Rita’s voice echoes around the valley as she shouts from the top, “They’re coming!”

  I turn and look back up the slope, and there’s Sepp and the farmhand at the front of a column of excited goats. When they’ve crossed the bottleneck of the bridge at the top, there’s nothing to hold them back, and they seem to almost flow like the stream down the mountainside. I don’t wait. I get to the bottom of the slope and set off along the lakeside as fast as my four legs can carry me. Which isn’t all that fast. I’ve not gotten far before the first of the herd I aspire to join makes a break to get past me, then slows to a trot. Another passes at a fast trot, followed by another, and another, then the farmhand, who strides by waving a stick and loudly encouraging us goats with “Chumm jetze! Chumm jetze!”

  The reaction of the other goats to me isn’t all that encouraging. I can see they’re bunched up behind me as I clank and huff and puff along, until they get the nerve to get past me. The frequency of goats going past increases. I’m still blundering along, desperately trying to keep up, but when I try to break into a trot myself, I stumble and only just manage to stop myself going face-first into the gravel. This is an even worse prospect given that my deeply ingrained i
nstinct to stop my face from scraping along the ground has been compromised by having two front legs Velcroed to my forearms.

  The main body of the herd swarms past, followed by a few stragglers, then finally by Sepp bringing up the rear.

  “Too slowwww,” he drawls as he strides past. Sweat is dripping off the end of my nose. My arms are on fire, and I can’t really feel my knuckles, but I imagine there’s not all that much skin left on them. All I can do is watch as the last few goats trot along the path at the end of the lakeside, over the bank of the earth dam, and are gone.

  I struggle on a few more metres, but I know it’s in vain. The bleats of the herd are fading out of earshot, and then I’m the only goat, a lonely goat, high on a hill. All the misgivings of Professor Hutchinson and Dr. Heath and Geoff come painfully to mind. I’ve managed to keep up with the real goats for maybe 750 metres…Let’s say a kilometre. Not very good, I know, but until you’ve had to do one-arm push-ups for a kilometre with some excited goats moving at a fast trot, then, gentle reader, I don’t think you’re in a position to criticise. If I sound defensive, well, I think it’s because I’m so disappointed. For a moment I’d felt the exhilaration of moving as part of the herd, but all too soon the moment has passed.

  With no goats around to see me, I do a very ungoatlike thing. I take a seat on a rock and contemplate the situation.

  It’s pretty clear there’s nothing for it. I’m just going to have to take it slow and make my own way down the mountain to the winter pasture.

  I feel a bit more relaxed travelling at a walk and not trying to keep up with the trotting goats, and the going is slow but steady. I follow the track beside the lake for another couple of kilometres, then cross the long earth-bank dam, and start heading down the path to the valley below.

  My short neck comes back to haunt me.

  It’s some hours before I arrive down in the valley and sight what I hope is my herd of goats, grazing contentedly in fields surrounding a lone farmhouse. I don’t want to be shot by a Swiss farmer mistaking me for some strange goat-man-beast intent on worrying his animals, so I figure it best to ask politely at the farmhouse. The farmer, Tomas, answers the door, but Sepp is there, too, extremely surprised to see us. I say I’d like to rejoin the herd. Sepp defers to Tomas: “They’re his goats down here.”

  “Be my guest,” says Tomas.

  After negotiating several electric fences, I’m able to rejoin the herd on the slopes of their new pasture, which is covered in every goat’s desire, fresh green grass. And so, gentle reader, finally I am living the goat life.

  Ahhhh, the goat life. This consists of walking to a patch of grass and eating it for five minutes or so. Walking to another patch of grass, eating that. And so on and so forth. I begin to learn the subtleties of the different types of grass: the blue-green patches of grass are bitter, whereas the greener-green grass is sweet and much preferable.

  Chew, chew, chew. Spit chewed grass into tube from the prosthetic rumen bag strapped to my torso. Walk to new patch of grass. As foreseen, there is the slight difficulty of actually getting my mouth to the grass because of my inconveniently short neck. The system I develop is basically getting down on my forelegs and planting my face in a particularly green patch, tearing off as much grass as I can fit in my mouth, then getting back to my feet and chewing it over before spitting it into my rumen for later.

  I also discover I’m really quite good at being a goat as long as I’m moving uphill. Yes, I’m a most curious animal: a goat that can only go up. And now that I’m not clanking and huffing and puffing along, but just calmly walking around eating grass as a goat should, my fellow goats are much more accepting. Curious even. I wonder what they think of me. A couple come over to check me out, sniffing at my face. I try and sniff back, ignoring my human physical aversion to the powerful smell of their breath: a deep odour of fermenting grass, like distilled farmer’s silage. Though a few seem a bit scared at first, once they see me enjoying the grass like them, they stop avoiding me. And one goat in particular, goat number eighteen, is a goat I seem to spend most of my day wandering around with. It’s kind of nice: I wander after her when she moves to another patch of grass, and likewise when I move off, she’s not far behind.

  However, my propensity for only going uphill means that eventually I find I’ve wandered into the middle of things and become nearly the highest goat on the hillside. I happen to look up from grazing, and I realise that the entire herd is looking at me. It’s suddenly gotten very quiet. Everyone’s stopped chewing.

  It’s like the part in a Western when the entire saloon suddenly falls silent because the newcomer has done something provocative, something that threatens to upset the established scheme. And I’m looking, and all the other goats are looking back, and I’m starting to feel a little bit uneasy because those horns are actually quite pointy, and some of these goats are about as big as I am, and I become very much aware that they’re far stronger and more agile, too.

  It had all been going so well, but I may have inadvertently committed a goat faux pas. I remember reading that being the highest up in a herd can be a display of dominance. I think I may have just challenged the dominance hierarchy without realising it. Oops.

  I’m kind of ashamed to say that I’m thinking that if it’s going to come to a fight, I can probably give a pretty good right hook with my prosthetic front leg. I say “ashamed” because a goat doesn’t box; I should be thinking of butting with my head. In a choice between fighting like a goat and so being put in my place at the bottom of the pecking order or fighting dirty and establishing myself somewhere higher up, I am poised for the latter.

  In any case, it doesn’t come to that. I think it’s goat number eighteen who steps in and diffuses the situation. She breaks the impasse by simply walking through the middle of the group and starting to wander. The other goats take their cue from her, and the palpable tension in the herd drains away. We get back to wandering and eating, and all drift over the brow of the hill.

  And that’s how I could spend the next week…Except, of course, towards the end of the day it starts raining, and though my mother’s waterproof suit holds up for a while, the sweat that I’ve generated with my exertions means I’m pretty damp anyway, and it’s not too long before I start shivering. And despite all the grass I start getting rather hungry. And my feet are cold. And the prospect of spending the night out here in the field as the temperature drops near or below freezing really starts to seem not very fun. And I start to think of how nice it would be to have a nice, warm fire.

  I’ve eaten more grass in one day than I’ve eaten in my whole life up to this point. Even though I’ve been spitting it into my artificial rumen bag, the process of chewing it up has inevitably involved swallowing some of it. I quite like the taste of grass, but, of course, lacking the amazing internal bacteria farm of a goat’s rumen, I’ve managed to derive very little in the way of nutrition from the grass I’ve eaten. It’s time to get the pressure cooker out.

  We find a spot, and I build a human campfire, with my human hands. Everything I’ve read says to not put a pressure cooker on a campfire due to the risk of uneven heating and explosion and so on, but by this stage I’m beyond caring. I empty my rumen bag of chewed up grass into the pot, screw down the lid, stick it on the fire, and stand back.

  It doesn’t take too long before the little weight on the pressure cooker’s valve starts being bumped up by steam, indicating the pressure inside the vessel has built up. I lift it off the campfire. The explosive part of the protocol for explosive steam treatment refers to the sudden change of pressure needed to break down the fibrous structures the molecules of cellulose make up, so acid can then break them down into sugars. I hope in this instance it isn’t actually going to mean explosive, as I gingerly unscrew the knob clamping on the lid. Steam whistles out as I release the pressure. Inside is a kind of grass soupy stew, slightly burnt at the bottom. It doesn’t look very appetising at all. I add some acetic acid (vinegar) to th
e (hopefully) partially broken down fibrous grass and put the pressure cooker back on the fire for the acid to hydrolyse the cellulose into some lovely, energy-giving sugars. After a few minutes more I decide it’s time to eat. But what exactly will I be eating? Indigestible fibre, or delicious sugar?

  The muddy orange colour indicates the presence of sugars.

  Delicious!

  I’ve brought a chemical called Benedict’s reagent with me, which can be used as a simple test for the presence of sugars in a solution. Basically, you add a few drops to a sample of what you want to test, boil it up, and if it turns orange, there’s sugar present. Time for some campfire chemistry.

  I put a bit of my grass-stewy soup into a test tube, add the Benedict’s solution, and heat it up in a water bath on the remains of the campfire. It’s gotten dark, but by torchlight I can see: the sample has turned orange! Well, technically a muddy brown, but it is definitely more orange than it was before. There’s at least some sort of sugar in there! And sugar means energy!

  I tuck into the most unappetising meal of my life: burnt grass stew. It doesn’t taste particularly sweet. Nor does it seem to me particularly nutritious. I consider the potential for the Goat Diet and decide it tastes bad enough to be a goer with a bit of marketing.

  When we finally get back to the farm, Rita invites us for dinner at the farmhouse. Never have I been so grateful. It’s so nice and cosy inside. Rita has cooked a big pot of goat stew, which we eat with bread and goat cheese. I indulge in cannibalism. It’s disturbing, but, after a day eating nothing but grass, quite delicious. Disturbing. But delicious. But oh, so disturbing. But really, really delicious.