The Farm in the Green Mountains

by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

  Heidi was snow white, looked very noble and wise, and simply couldn’t stand solitude, as it very soon became evident. As long as she had human attention she stopped bleating, but scarcely was she left alone when she began to sound like a broken alpine horn. Since we had no neighbors, this damaged only our nerves, and they were long beyond repair.

  The other Saanen, a little four-month-old kid, was tied to a stake with her sister. The little goats jumped about happily and full of life, but when one was loaded into our car the remaining one cried for her in such nameless despair that we felt like plantation owners cruelly separating a negro family at a slave market.

  I exchanged a short glance of agreement with Winnetou, and soon we had bought the other little Saanen as well.

  The reunion of the lively sisters was no small matter for our car.

  But now Winnetou spent all the time, while I was busy loading the goats, discussing prices, and paying, with a small brown Toggenburg that lay wearily on the grass, studying us with sad eyes.

  When Winnetou stroked her, she raised herself up on her short, weak legs and licked Winnetou’s hand. The little goat’s head was large, her coat long and rough, her body plump, and legs thin. She looked as if she had been put together wrong, and it was hard to guess her age.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Winnetou asked the owner. “And how old is she?”

  “She is already a year old,” he said, “but she is retarded. I tried out a new method of feeding on her, but it didn’t suit her.”

  He wanted only eight dollars for the goat, and we now had another unintended goat in the car.

  If our transportation of young chickens was disgusting, our transportation of goats was marked by an unbearable exhibition of tender affection.

  I chauffeured, and Winnetou had the job of keeping the four goats off my neck.

  The little Saanens put their forelegs on Winnetou’s shoulders and nibbled at her hair. Heidi licked my neck and ears as though they were a block of salt. The goats’ behavior and the tickling sent Winnetou and me into foolish, tortured giggles.

  The Toggenburg rushed around among the other goats as if shut up in a too-small shipping cage, and she only stood still once in a while to let great lakes stream onto the sawdust and newspapers, inspiring the other goats to do the same.

  By the time we reached the farm the car looked as though we had carried an entire kennel of dogs that were not yet house-broken, and with them a herd of deer that had left its droppings behind.

  The car was such a mess that we decided to fetch the two pigs we had ordered the same day, so that we could combine the dirt and smell in one day, and not take it in installments.

  It took several days of washing, scrubbing, and rinsing the car, and we had to dry it in the strongest sunlight before it got back its usual smell.

  Zuck showed no surprise over the arrival of double the order of goats—by this time we could not be astonished, upset, or amazed by anything.

  The Toggenburg reminded Zuck of a shaggy old dog we had once, and he named her “Mucki” after that ugly, bowlegged canine.

  Mucki was put with Heidi in one section of the stall. The sisters, whom we called Flicki and Flocki, went into the other.

  One outer wall of their roomy stall was made of movable slats that we could shove aside and thus let each goat stick her head through a separate hole to get at her dish of food. The food dishes were attached to a wooden bench in front of the openings and looked like a row of children’s potties. The movable slats closed like horse collars around the goats’ necks so that they had to eat their feed in peace and without mischief.

  Once in the summer, when we brought our goats into a large shed that didn’t have this carefully prepared arrangement for feeding them, their eating became an orgy of mischief. They threw the full dishes of food into the air and caught them on their noses. They turned water buckets into helmets. They fought over one dish, forgetting the three other dishes set out for them. In brief, the playfulness of goats knows no bounds, and their desire to play is beyond reckoning.

  At first only Heidi needed to be milked, but in the course of time, when they had all become milk goats, Zuck began to train them.

  It was a pretty sight and fun to watch when Zuck called their names, and one after the other they jumped eagerly and gracefully up onto the milking stand to be milked. The stand was made of a board a yard wide that during the day was fastened up to the wall with a hook, like a prison bed. At milking time we let the board down until it came to rest on a two-foot-high folding leg.

  To milk we sat on a side extension of the platform, planned as a sort of stool for the milker.

  This raised arrangement, this podium, is useful and convenient. Otherwise you have to sit or kneel on the floor to milk, since goats are only half as tall as cows.

  You must be born a milker, or you have to have a feel for it. Zuck and Winnetou were outstanding milkers. I, however, did not seem to be born to milk, and had only the feeling that I hurt my hands, arms, and back by it. I groaned at the effort, took three times as long as was necessary, and on top of this I could not help suspecting that the goats were laughing at me.

  The goats became the object of our heartfelt love and the reason for our wildest outbreaks of rage. They were fun and trouble, joy and vexation. They subjected our feelings to rapid swings between a desire to murder them and a wish to hug them tenderly.

  The unruliest animal was Mucki.

  When she was put on a normal diet and fed extra tidbits, sheared by Winnetou and so robbed of her shaggy coat, she grew large, strong, and long-legged.

  She looked like a doe in the woods, so we locked her up when hunting season came and hunters invaded the woods. With the exception of the ball-playing sea lions and seals, goats are probably the animals that have the most fully developed sense of fun.

  To state that goats eat everything, including tin cans, is just as mistaken as to say that a well-fed dog would rather take his meals from the garbage can.

  For a dog a rotting bone is a delicacy that belongs to the same type of taste as Limburger or Camembert cheese, or highly flavored venison.

  Goats are extremely fastidious creatures. They will eat no hay on which they have stood or lain, and no food that is not served to them in the cleanest manner.

  Their unquenchable taste for roses, shoes, green apples, lawn chairs, pieces of laundry, and cigarette butts must come from the same impulse that leads well-fed small children to consume shoe polish like butter, to munch on matches like French fries, and to suck on candles like candy sticks.

  Our four goats had 193 acres of land at their disposal, meadows, woods, streams, pastures, and rocks. In the morning they rushed off ready for any adventure, but after scarcely an hour they were back, trying to break into the vegetable and flower gardens, pulling laundry off the line, eating up the chicken feed, running into the living room and trying to make themselves comfortable in the armchairs by the fireplace. In short, they were everywhere that they didn’t belong, and repeatedly brought all of our prevention schemes to nothing. We built fences against them around each garden, around trees, around the chicken houses. Soon we had ourselves ringed about as though we were in a palisade fortified against Indian attacks, but they still found ways to slip through.

  There was nothing left to do but to go with them to the meadow, where at most they ate a couple of pages out of the books we brought along. Or we could stake them out. In spite of providing them with extra long chains and changing the position of the stakes several times a day, so that they always had new, fresh grass to eat, they complained and bleated in a way that broke our hearts. We let them loose again to make trouble.

  On the same day that the goats arrived we brought home two pigs.

  They were small, rosy animals, clean and happy. They were surely the most useful of our farm animals, but it was no fun to feed something alive three times a day only to be able, after a given time, to hang them up as hams, to pack them into barrels, and
to preserve them in the freezer.

  In addition to our planned purchases, we received an unexpected gift.

  The owner of our general store drove up to our pond early one morning in his delivery truck and stopped there.

  He handed over four ducks to us, two lovely brown and white ducks like wild ducks, and two fat white Peking ducks with yellow bills.

  One of the white ducks, a drake, died of fatty degeneration of the heart shortly after his arrival.

  The four ducks had lived until now on the village pond, where they had roused summer visitors out of their morning slumbers by immoderate quacking. The store owner was looking for a good home for the ducks where they couldn’t wake or disturb anyone—except us.

  He put them on the water, and they swam away as if it were their old familiar home. Then, quacking approval, they took possession of our pond.

  We had published a notice in a farm newspaper that we were looking for geese. One Sunday afternoon an old Ford rattled up the hill.

  On the front seat sat an old couple, while out of the back seat twisted the necks of two geese. Their bodies were tied up in brown feed sacks that we could hardly see in the clutter of tools, sacks, and gas cans.

  When the old people took the geese out of the car and unwrapped them, the gander hissed at us threateningly and beat with his mighty wings like an angry swan.

  The white goose that belonged to him was big, fat, and phlegmatic. The expression of her eyes and the way she held her head was so human in its stupidity that she reminded me immediately of a certain type of housewife and aunt. The term “silly goose” was clearly demonstrated in her.

  We received an extra creature with the pair of geese. The farmer’s wife released from another sack a small, dainty white duck with a yellow bill. It had hardly crept out of the sack when it collapsed on the grass half dead with fright.

  At that moment the white gander plunged at the little duck as if he wanted to peck it to bits. But when he reached her, he stopped and touched her gently with his bill.

  The little duck opened her eyes, got up, shook her feathers, and ran around behind the big gander as if she had never been upset. The big gander and the little duck went off to the pond, while the white goose stood there and looked after them with glassy blue eyes.

  “They can’t be separated,” said the old farmer’s wife, pointing to the departing pair, “the gander and the duck. He raised her. I won’t charge anything for the duck,” she added.

  The farm couple climbed into their Ford and drove down the mountain. Little did they know what lessons in psychology they had arranged for us, and what unsolvable problems they had left behind.

  Three geese and a drake were the concluding purchases of farm animals. The geese were magnificent specimens of the gray Toulouse breed. They cost five dollars apiece and were shipped to us by freight from Cape Cod.

  The drake was a blue-green, black, and white bird of fabulous beauty. We bought him for the pond ducks which had been given to us, and we promised ourselves ducklings of heavenly beauty from the mating.

  Now we were all set: the stalls were finished, the feed ready, the animals gathered around us, and we were about to take care of them according to all the rules of the art, systematically, properly, and expertly.

  The practical skills were easily learned, but the imponderables and accidents were incomprehensible and innumerable.

  We had begun the farm experiment with the illusion that it would be a foundation for our self-sufficiency and would give Zuck the possibility of doing his work.

  He had had the choice of rowing as a slave in the Hollywood galleys with the convict’s wages for forced labor or, on the other hand, doing his own work as his own master. But in America everything is always different and unforeseeable.

  It is a riddle to me to this day how he found the time to write a play, to plan novels and stories, and sometimes even to compose a poem. As soon as he sat down in his room, we could be sure that the pigpen door would fall off its hinges, that a drake would become involved in a life-threatening fight with a gander, that the fireplace fire would start to smolder and drive clouds of smoke into his room, or that water from a cloudburst would pour through the roof into the kitchen.

  He usually met these disturbances with a collection of German and American curses that brought approving grins even to the faces of the backwoods lumberjacks that often worked around our house.

  But he always jumped up and did the job, because his other and true work had become rather abstract and uncertain at this point in his life. He had lost his voice and resonance, and he could at best carry on monologues with his desk drawer. Into this vanished the piles of outlines and sketches.

  There we sat in our Noah’s ark, shaken by storms and tempests, visited by torments, pursued by a chain of small disasters. We learned from them how to meet large catastrophes, how to deal with annoyances, and how to meet storms and tempests.

  CONFUSION IN THE CHICKEN YARD

  Soon we had a shed built between the two chicken houses. It connected them and was to serve as a shelter for the geese and ducks.

  The white Muscovy ducks increased at an unexpected rate. Gussy, the asocial one, came home in the second summer with thirteen ducklings. Emma had twelve. Daughters of Gussy and Emma hatched two ducklings each. In short, the place was overrun with ducklings.

  The duck families were put into individual small houses, but for the fall and winter there had to be housing for the remaining ducks that were not sold and not killed.

  The geese had produced only eight goslings. We saved one of these, and so had to house six geese for the winter.

  Now we could have made one section for ducks and one for geese in the new shed, but that wouldn’t work for our feathered family.

  During the day it was still possible to keep them together. They had the run of a wide area of meadows, water, and woods. But even there they formed distinct groups, while in the evening they collected into exclusive units opposed to each other.

  To try to change these units was to risk death and destruction. There were the six founding hens with their leader, the hen Elise, who formed the “gray family.” They weren’t exactly tyrannical, just domineering. They had taken over the leadership deliberately and peacefully—they tolerated only deliberate and peaceful chickens of other colors among them and threw nervous, squawking chickens out of their house without ado.

  Here we should also note that nervous, anxious chickens are poor layers, and that you can tell good layers by their comb, eyes, legs, and behavior.

  Therefore we picked out the most peaceful and best among the red chickens, the ones that the gray family couldn’t object to, and put them in the gray house. Together with them it now had ten red and seven gray hens.

  In the red house we had eighteen red leghorns. We thought that two roosters would be right for two chicken houses, but that was wrong, because one rooster was quickly killed off by the other.

  These were two red roosters that we had picked out of the group of young roosters and had raised—probably brothers. In the first round of their fight, they were well matched. In the second round, one scratched out the eye of the other and so made him the weaker. In the third round, the stronger one dislocated the hip joint of the weaker. In the fourth, he bit his comb to pieces. In the last round, he scratched out the second eye and so made him totally blind. This cockfight went on during an entire week. We interfered as often as we could, but finally we had to kill the defeated rooster.

  After his final conquest, the victor strutted about, bloodstained and proud, approached one or another hen absentmindedly, and then forgot his victory and went searching for worms.

  That rooster belonged to the sort that are not concerned with reproduction, but with hunting for insects, larvae, and worms. He used to call the hens with a cry that was not much different from that of a mother hen calling her chicks, and then he divided his booty with his harem without assuring a proper share to himself. Sometimes he was so e
ager in his sharing that he began visibly to waste away, and we had to feed him an extra ration morning and evening to keep up his strength.

  That rooster would now have remained the sole and uncontested ruler, if it had not been for the fighting cock Napoleon.

  You see, we had a family of Bantam chickens that we had bought because of their beauty and appeal.

  They were silver “Sebright Bantams” belonging to the category “ornamental” fowl. Their black-bordered silver feathers, dark beaks, and slate-blue legs made them the real decoration of the chicken yard.

  They are not as heavy as domestic chickens, can really fly, and choose the highest beams in the chicken house for sleeping.

  Their little eggs taste something like pewit eggs when hardboiled, and since the family multiplied, we had to kill and eat some of the chickens from time to time and therefore knew that the meat tasted like a cross between pigeon and partridge.

  At first we acquired only a pair, and since the feathers of the Bantam hen reminded me of the coronation cloak of Josephine Beauharnais, we called her Josephine and her rooster Napoleon.

  Now one of the characteristics of these wild fowl is that many of the roosters are quite belligerent.

  So it happened not infrequently that our Napoleon, small and light, weighing hardly a pound and a half, shot down from the chicken house roof, plunged onto the head of the large chicken yard rooster, and was so nimble in his attack that the giant had to give way before the dwarf.

  But when Napoleon forgot his small size and dared to attack from the ground, the fight was dangerous for him, and he was saved from certain death only by our timely intervention.

  Sometimes Napoleon even attacked us.

  He began by dragging his right wing like a toreador’s cloak on the ground, coming ever closer in rapid circles, and suddenly, breaking out of the last circle, lunging at us and pecking at our knuckles with his sharp beak.

  When he was angry I didn’t dare approach him unless armed with a broom.

  In the first year we had them, Napoleon and Josephine produced a little chicken that we named Lisettchen.