I fed the goat last night, of that, I am sure. He was fine. He made noises no worse than his usual, but something about him has been bothering me, and I could not put my finger on it. He seemed a little more mellow over the last few months than when we first got him, that’s for sure. But yesterday there was something else. Maybe more noise with no apparent reason? That might have bene what was bothering me. He had his food and water. But when I went to feed him today, I got the pitchfork full and turned and walked to his pen, only to see he was lay on his side. He never lays on his side. All was quiet. I knew right then. I yelled over to the other side of the pens where my oldest daughter was feeding the dog that lives next to the goat, and she walked over, looked, then grabbed a loose t-post that was laying on the ground outside the pen and poked him with it. “Yep! He’s dead alright!”
After feeding all the other hay out, I got a chain and changed the hay fork off the tractor and put on the bucket. I used the chain around his horns to life him out of the pen, then got him into the bucket. That’s where he will stay tonight. Tomorrow, after I have taken the girls to school, I will dump the goat on the pack of the pasture across the street, far from the neighbor’s house so he doesn’t cause a stench and leave him where I can find him again next year. He will no doubt lay out all winter in the cold and remain preserved in the ice and snow. But come next spring, the bugs will come out and clean his bones and especially his skull up good. I intend to hang that on the end of the granary when it is sorted. I’ve been planning this from when he was young and drove me nuts with his attitude. I admit that lately he was been a lot easier for me to deal with, and I have even kind of liked the guy quite a bit. I am bummed about his dying. But that ain’t going to stop me having a wicked decoration on the outbuilding.
There was a time I would not have thought of doing such a thing. But those days are long past now. After all, he who deals in livestock also deals in dead-stock. I have had a lot of animals come through here. And now-a-days I don’t see it much different to breaking a wishbone from a bird anyhow. We do what we have become comfortable with.
The silver lining in all this is that I have less hay feeding to worry about over the winter. Oh, and I will try the beagles in his pen to see if they can bear to live next to the border collie that has lived next to the goat that just died. If they can, then I finally have a place for the dogs to live away from the bottom of the tree that died in the middle of the back yard, ironically from the goats that once lived there and ate the bark away from the trunk of the tree. I want to remove that dog pen at the tree trunk and then remove the tree. It is going to be dangerous soon and possibly cause some damage to our outbuildings. I want that down, and the yard opened up in time for when these new grandkids of ours come over and want to run free in the back yard. A big open yard will be a pleasant change from what we did to it all those years ago when we put that pen into it. I want to fence off the yard, too, to keep the kids where they can be found easily, and out from things like my sawmill and driveways. So, yeah, this has a silver lining in it, even though I am genuinely sad the old guy has left us.
It’s 8:30PM now. Time for me to read for the evening, then off to bed. I am not feeling as well as I would like to be. So I am going to try to sleep it off and hope for a better day tomorrow.