Flat Broke with Two Goats

by Jennifer McGaha

  “Sure,” he said.

  We followed the man up the bank where, nestled in a pile of leaves and pine needles, were two tiny clumps, each the color and size of a batch of biscuit dough.

  “They were just born,” the man said.

  The goats were silent and wide-eyed, their fur still wet. As the three of us knelt in the leaves, I was both thrilled to see these newborns and horrified that their mother appeared to be nowhere around, that they were out here in the open where dogs or wild animals could snatch them, where one of the many goats wandering loose could accidentally step on them. Finally, after what seemed like hours but was likely only fifteen or twenty minutes, Sheila arrived.

  “Sorry I’m late!” she said, breezing by to check on the babies before leading us to the barn.

  Relieved and ready to go home and get our goats settled, we headed to Maple’s stall. As we walked in, another doeling slipped around us and into the stall. The doeling was very young, maybe a month old, and light brown—a miniature camel. As soon as she was in the stall, she headed for Maple and tried to latch on to her teats. Maple vigorously kicked and head-butted her. I watched, aghast, as the doeling backed up, then tried again. Maple growled and head-butted her into the corner. Finally, Sheila dragged the doeling out of the stall.

  “Where’s her mother?” I asked.

  “Up the hill somewhere,” Sheila said. “She just keeps running off and leaving her, and the baby keeps coming in here to try to get milk.”

  Finally, someone—I’m not sure which one of us—suggested that we take her too. Sheila would give us a special deal if we did. The doeling was so thin, we didn’t know if she would survive. I felt certain, however, that she wouldn’t survive here, so as Sheila led Maple and Cinnamon out to our car, I followed carrying the new doeling. David and Sheila lifted Maple and her doeling into a dog crate in the back of our car, and while David paid Sheila the amount due, I settled into the front seat with the errant doeling on my lap. Before we were even out of the driveway, she fell asleep with her head in the crook of my arm. We had to be prepared to lose this doeling. I knew that. She was so malnourished, I could see each notch on her spine. Maybe I shouldn’t be holding her. Maybe we shouldn’t name her. But we did. By the time we pulled into the driveway at home, it was settled. Her name was Willow.

  Willow had not nursed all day, but Sheila had assured us that we could simply milk Maple when we got her home, then give Willow the milk in a bottle. Maple would make plenty of milk for both doelings. No problem. We weren’t concerned that we had never milked a goat before or that Maple had never been milked. People had been doing this forever. Plus, we had read Storey’s Guide to Raising Dairy Goats so many times, we knew it almost by heart. How hard could this possibly be? The answer was, pretty hard. At least until you learned how to do it. And then, once you knew how to do it, it seems simple, like riding a bike, and you couldn’t remember ever not knowing how to do it.

  When we first got Maple and the doelings, though, we knew nothing about how to milk or how to handle a frightened doe. We figured that out later, much later. That evening, once we had the goats in the barn, David knelt on the straw, squeezing Maple’s teats at the top, then rolling his fingers down gently, just like Storey’s Guide instructed. Terrified, Maple kicked and head-butted and threw her body sideways into the barn wall. Finally, David gave up. He stood and rubbed her neck, ran his hands through her soft fur.

  “I just can’t,” he said. “She’s not going to let me. We have to go to Plan B.”

  The problem was, we had no Plan B. I stood outside the barn door cradling Willow in an old towel like a human infant. She was sound asleep. Already, I loved her, and now, we had no way to feed her. It was almost 10:30 p.m., and all the farm supply stores in town were closed. However, a grocery store in Mills River, a twenty-minute drive away, was open until eleven. If I hurried, I had time to get there.

  While David took care of Willow and settled Maple and Cinnamon into their stall for the night, I drove to Mills River, raced through the massive store until I located a quart of goat’s milk, then hurried home. In my kitchen, I heated the milk and poured it into a bottle. Once again, I swaddled Willow in a towel and sat at the kitchen table. I had envisioned this as a special bonding moment, something like feeding my own babies. Willow would stare lovingly into my eyes, gulping the warm milk before drifting back to sleep in my arms. Instead, whenever I put the bottle near her lips, she squirmed and writhed and thrashed.

  “Yum, yum,” I told her, squirting milk on her lips. “Milk!”

  She tightly shut her lips and turned her head. Finally, holding her with one arm and wedging her between my thigh and the table, I pried her lips open and squeezed the bottle. She gagged, then sputtered and coughed as milk ran out and down the side of her mouth. Hester sat beside me, nervously wagging her tail and licking up the milk that dripped onto the floor.

  “Well, shit,” I said.

  David was back from the barn, and he offered support in the form of a Google search.

  “It says to squeeze some milk on her lips,” he called from his desk.

  “I already tried that,” I said.

  Finally, using a squeeze and release and hold-the-goat-upright-so-she-doesn’t-choke technique, I got her to drink a few ounces. The entire process had taken close to an hour, and we were both exhausted. We couldn’t leave Willow in the barn with Maple, so after she fell asleep in my arms, I carried her into the boiler room, put her on a pile of newspapers, and pulled a baby gate across the doorway. Hester stretched next to the gate in what I hoped was a protective pose. Then I went upstairs and fell soundly asleep.

  Early the next morning, I got up and repeated the entire feeding routine with Willow, and this time, she did ever-so-slightly better. After I was satisfied that she had drunk enough milk, I put her back in the boiler room, and David and I headed down to the barn to let Maple and Cinnamon outside. They bolted from the barn and huddled together in one corner—two sleek, graceful figures on the dewy field. Cinnamon occasionally dipped under Maple’s belly to nurse, then quickly resumed her post by her mother’s right front leg. Whenever I tried to pet her, Maple butted me away. Soon, I gave up trying and went back to the house to get Willow. All afternoon, Willow and I sat in the field while David worked in the barn. Once or twice, Cinnamon sidled over to me, nibbled my pants leg, and eyed Willow, but soon Maple scurried over and shooed her away. Maple did not trust me. It was going to take some time.

  That evening, when David and I went inside to eat dinner, Maple and Cinnamon were still in the same spot in the corner of the field. Afraid to leave Willow alone with Maple, I put her back in the boiler room. She curled up on the newspapers and closed her eyes. Equally exhausted, David and I sank onto bar stools in the kitchen and silently shoveled down heaping bowls of pintos and rice and cornbread.

  We had had the does exactly twenty-four hours, and it all still seemed surreal—this house, the chickens, the goats. Ten years ago, my life had been radically different. I had chaired a silent auction at the local playhouse. I had volunteered at my kids’ private school. I lectured at the local college. I had taken nice vacations—to the Grand Canyon, the Florida Keys, Paris, Barcelona. I had attended tea parties and Longaberger basket parties and ice cream socials. It was, on the surface, a good life, a life I had thought that I wanted, and if someone had told me then that one day I would be sitting in a three-story cabin full of snakes and mice and wolf spiders eating pinto beans while a goat slept on a pile of a newspapers by a wood boiler that was my primary source of heat, I would have thought that someone was on hallucinogens. And yet, here I was. Here we were. Our transformation amazed me.

  David and I had been inside for fifteen or twenty minutes, maximum, before he headed back down to the barn. Within moments, I heard him hollering. I had no idea what he was saying, but I could tell he was frantic. I grabbed Willow from the boiler room and ran outside an
d down the drive, and even after I got to the empty field, it took a moment for the words to sink in.

  “They’re gone!” David said. “They’re gone!”

  I looked from him to the fence, across the hollow, up the hillsides covered with rhododendron thickets so dense, you couldn’t see more than a foot in front of you in places. There was no sign of the goats. No rustling leaves or stamping hooves. Nothing. Too astonished to move, I waited for David to say something else, to figure out what we should do.

  “Take her back inside, and meet me on the hill,” he said.

  I ran Willow back to the boiler room and secured her gate. Then David and I began scouring the woods, hiking up and down the ridge on both sides of the driveway. When that search produced nothing, we took Hester and Reba outside on leashes to see if they could pick up on the goats’ scents. After they sniffed for a while at the bank across from the barn, on the side that eventually led to the highway, we drove around and searched the other side of the mountain. Again, nothing. At midnight, physically exhausted and emotionally spent, I fell asleep, but David continued to search. He paced the driveway, drove up and down the roads near our house, hiked once again to the ridgeline in the dark. Not a trace. It was as if, as David said, the goats had been beamed into space.

  The next morning, we posted “Lost Goats” signs on all the major roads. We called our neighbors and animal control and sent our dogs on search missions through the woods, but we never found any evidence that they were close by or, in fact, that they had ever been here at all. As time went on, we even considered the possibility that someone had stolen them. It just seemed so unlikely that they had disappeared so quickly and so thoroughly. Perhaps that was easier than picturing what had likely happened, that they had run up the mountain and eaten rhododendron leaves, which would have quickly killed them. Or worse, they had made it until dark and been attacked by coyotes. Or worst of all, that they managed to survive for a few days before finally succumbing to hunger and cold.

  We were devastated. Though we had thought their fence was adequate, it obviously had not been. We had read that goats could escape from fences easily. We just didn’t know how easily. Somehow, the goats had managed to slip between the gate and fence or to climb over. Here was even more glaring evidence of our incompetence, our fuckedupness. And while I blamed us, I also blamed Sheila for selling people brand-new to goat rearing two animals that were so skittish, they were almost wild. Our friends who had farm animals said their goats often got out of their fences and just stood in the yard outside the fence or walked up to the house. But Maple did not yet recognize this as home or us as family, and with her doeling in tow, she must have bolted so hard and so fast, we would not have been able to catch them even if we had seen them.

  In the days that followed, we continued to search. We kept hoping the goats would “show back up,” a phrase so nebulous as to encompass all possibilities without dwelling on their probable fate. While David fortified gates and fences, I was Willow’s constant companion. If I couldn’t bring Maple and Cinnamon back, I could do my best to keep her safe, so I took her outside and followed her around with a copy of Storey’s Guide opened to the “Bad Weeds for Goats” section, complete with illustrations. Every time she showed interest in a plant, I held up the book to determine whether it was one of the forbidden weeds. I offered her warm goat’s milk infused with molasses every few hours, but she never really learned to take the bottle, so I began feeding her in the kitchen from a saucer propped on an upside-down soup kettle. At night, I wrapped her in a towel and held her while we watched Columbo reruns on my computer.

  Still, I worried about her. Goats are herd animals. They should never be raised by themselves, so despite the fact that Willow was rarely technically alone, I worried she was lonely, that she needed another goat companion. Getting a new goat seemed to close forever the albeit remote possibility that Maple and Cinnamon had somehow survived. However, we finally accepted that they weren’t coming back and began to search for another goat.

  After calling everyone we knew and sort of knew, everyone who had ever raised goats or made goat cheese, after consulting Craigslist and Iwanna, and after a tense phone call with Sheila where she berated us for calling her on Easter Sunday before we could even explain why we were calling, I emailed the owners of Three Graces Dairy in Marshall, just outside of Asheville. Yes, they said. They had a doeling that just might work—a two-month-old Saanen. A few minutes after I got the email, David and I threw the dog crate in the back of the car and headed out to get her.

  The doeling was in a stall in a large, open-air barn with at least a dozen other babies, and before I saw the goats, I heard them. They were raucous and boisterous—kindergartners on a field trip or frat boys at a party—but when the farmer brought our girl out of the stall, I was so enthralled, I no longer heard the other goats. Pure white with pink bunny ears and a pink nose, she baaed and cried. I dropped to my knees, whispering to her, telling her how beautiful she was, how we had a lovely girl at home she would love, but she was distressed to be away from her bunkmates and unimpressed with me. As we pulled out of the road leading to the farm, she screamed out the back window until we had wound around a curve and her old home was no longer in sight. Moving, it seemed, was not easy, even for a goat.

  The new doeling had no name, just a red plastic chain around her neck holding a number: 11. That night, Number 11 and Willow both slept in the boiler room. The barn was ready, but we were afraid to trust it, afraid predators could burst through the pallet walls or climb over, afraid the girls would get cold.

  “Let me get this straight,” Alex said when I told her. “You and Dad are keeping two goats in the house?”

  “Not in the house,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous. The boiler room. They’re in the boiler room.”

  Finally, a few days later, we moved both Willow and Number 11, known now as Holly, out to the barn, which was protected by a complex system of gates and bungee cords and more bungee cords and more gates and metal locks and latches and more bungee cords. We wanted to do it right this time.

  In the daytime, the girls were inseparable, moving together through the field like one being—nibbling leaves and dandelions, lying on their sides in the sun, stretching their necks to try to reach the brush just outside their fence. At night, they cuddled in their stall, one girl’s head on the other girl’s back. In addition to eating grain, Holly still took a bottle once a day, and whenever I brought the old Coke bottle filled with milk, she grabbed it and tugged so hard, I had to brace myself to keep from falling. The milk was gone within seconds. Willow, on the other hand, still ate out of a saucer, and she still insisted on having molasses with her meal. If I forgot the molasses, she would not drink her milk. So four times a day, I carried out to the field a large pot, a saucer, a measuring cup full of warm milk, and a jar of molasses. And then David or I held Holly so Willow could eat.

  After a very bad start, things were starting to look up. Our doelings were healthy and happy, and Willow was getting bigger and stronger. She slept less. She ate more grain and hay. She was playful. Still, even if we did everything right, we wouldn’t have milk for at least another year, maybe two years if we waited a season to breed the girls, and now we had all this space, a nice barn and a secure field. So we began to talk again about buying a pregnant doe. That way, we would be able to enjoy the babies, and we would soon have milk. It would be a win-win situation. As before, we kept an eye on Craigslist, and soon we found a goat that sounded perfect—a pregnant Nigerian dwarf, due that summer.

  Molasses Cocktail for Finicky Goats

  Mix 1/4 cup blackstrap molasses with 2 cups warm goat’s milk. Pour into an empty, clean soda bottle fitted with a nipple, or if your goat is extra finicky, onto a plate propped on an overturned soup pot. Gently massage baby goat’s ears while she drinks.

  Chapter Twelve

  The milk of Nigerian dwarfs has a high percentage of fat, w
hich means their milk makes rich cheese, and because they are small, they need less space than standard breeds. David and I had watched hundreds of Nigerian dwarf videos online. The babies were playful, precocious, adorable. They ran through and over and under obstacles, chasing each other, jumping on the backs of dogs and donkeys and other goats. Every goat owner I talked to loved Nigerian dwarfs. However, they were all quick to tell me that Nigerians could be stubborn, and they didn’t give a lot of milk. And so, duly noting both the charms and drawbacks, one Saturday in May, David and I set out with Alex, who was home for the weekend, to get the pregnant doe.

  The farm was in rural South Carolina, somewhere vaguely near Spartanburg, past megachurches and dairy farms and the occasional McDonald’s. After several wrong turns and some backtracking, we were finally there, at a place that more closely resembled a petting zoo than any farm I had ever seen. There were turkeys, chickens, and a sow with a new litter of piglets, all in immaculate pens, and there were handmade wooden rabbit hutches with stoops where young visitors stood to feed the bunnies.

  The farmers, Harry and Jill, were chatty. Harry told us about his children, his first wife and the farmhand she ran off with, the beef cattle he used to raise back in Pennsylvania, the heart attack he had the previous year. Buying a milk goat, I was learning, involved more than just cash exchanged for an animal. It was a delicate dance in which each party sized the other up, gauged the other’s character. Has this farmer taken good care of this animal? Can I trust what he is telling me? Will this buyer take good care of this goat, or does she intend to turn her and all of her babies into goat curry?

  I had taken a fair share of social work classes in college, so I knew a little about active listening, which came in handy now as I told Harry I could imagine how hard it had been when his wife cheated on him, how I bet the heart attack must have been really scary, but all the while, I could feel David getting impatient. He was not a chitchatter. He paced around, clearing his throat repeatedly, while I threw him furtive looks. Stop. Stop being impatient. Finally, he could no longer contain himself.