Tutelary Spirits
Mar. 5th, 2006 03:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dancinghorseDHF has lost its first denizen: the goat died yesterday. She had been fading for a couple of weeks; I think last week had a heart attack or stroke and was suddenly very weak and unable to use her front legs well. She had seemed to rally after Horse Camp and was eating again (I was feeding her apples and carrots, and broccoli which she loved). Late last week she had an episode of body-temperature failure: overheated badly and needed to be hosed off and hand-fed water. Friday evening I thought she had gone: Capria suddenly went to the fence and stared intently at her, pawing and begging, and the other horses came to watch as well. But she got up and ate a little, was up walking around all night and into the morning, had a small breakfast. I had by that time begun to dig a grave: the land gave me a place close by her pen, just outside the dogs' fence near the palm tree. It was the only place on the property that had a patch of ground soft enough to dig into in this year of millennial drought, and the space it gave me was just the right size.
Yesterday in the early afternoon she was down and asleep. Three hours later when I took Spot out for her potty break just before a planned ride on keed, she was gone. She went in her sleep, but it looks as if she had a stroke. No ride for keed; I finished digging, then buried her before dark. She was kind with her timing.
Here she is last summer when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lynnesite was here at Camp Lippi with Ember and company.
She was absolutely ancient. When I moved in, she was here. Nobody wanted an old nanny goat with mastitis so bad she needed surgery, and long and wicked horns that she knew how to use (as Pooka found out some years later--he still has the scars of many many many stitches). The vet who operated on her (at great trouble and expense) said she was a Saanen, a Swiss breed, and she was a beautiful example of the breed. We used to say she was a Lipizzaner goat: big, white, and mysterious. She was our genius loci, our tutelary spirit. She and I never got along all that well, but she belonged here and she was part of the family, like an irritable elderly aunt with a wicked cane. She liked to be scratched between the horns, and she didn't mind being petted or groomed when she was itchy. She was very clean and fastidious--goats usually are, in spite of their reputation.
She never really had a name. Her previous owners called her Peggy Sue.casacorona and Tappan preferred to call her Juno. I just called her The Goat, because she was the archetype of her kind.
At first she lived in what is now the stallion barn, then she moved around to various parts of the barn. For some years she lived up behind the shed, near the house, where she kept company with the neighbor's horse. When we painted the shed, we moved her back down to the barn, having set up a pen behind the stallion run--and there she stayed, happily surrounded by horses and dogs, right in the middle of all the activity. Last summer in the Great Revamp, her pen was expanded into a garden apartment: a separate small pen into which she would move when we had horses in the larger pen (and Pooka was in there twice a day during the morning and evening turnout-switching shell game). The rest of the time she had the apartment to herself.
When I moved in, the seller said she had maybe a couple of years to go--she was not young then; the vet estimated her age at no less than 6 or 7 and possibly more, and her mastitis was acute. That was in 1994. Which means she lived to be 18 at the very least, and possibly 20 or more--ancient for a goat; their lifespan is about that of a dog (12-15 years). She was a tough old thing and she went out in her own time and in her own way. I hope, when it's time, I'm allowed to do as well.
Yesterday in the early afternoon she was down and asleep. Three hours later when I took Spot out for her potty break just before a planned ride on keed, she was gone. She went in her sleep, but it looks as if she had a stroke. No ride for keed; I finished digging, then buried her before dark. She was kind with her timing.
Here she is last summer when
lynnesite was here at Camp Lippi with Ember and company.She was absolutely ancient. When I moved in, she was here. Nobody wanted an old nanny goat with mastitis so bad she needed surgery, and long and wicked horns that she knew how to use (as Pooka found out some years later--he still has the scars of many many many stitches). The vet who operated on her (at great trouble and expense) said she was a Saanen, a Swiss breed, and she was a beautiful example of the breed. We used to say she was a Lipizzaner goat: big, white, and mysterious. She was our genius loci, our tutelary spirit. She and I never got along all that well, but she belonged here and she was part of the family, like an irritable elderly aunt with a wicked cane. She liked to be scratched between the horns, and she didn't mind being petted or groomed when she was itchy. She was very clean and fastidious--goats usually are, in spite of their reputation.
She never really had a name. Her previous owners called her Peggy Sue.
casacorona and Tappan preferred to call her Juno. I just called her The Goat, because she was the archetype of her kind.At first she lived in what is now the stallion barn, then she moved around to various parts of the barn. For some years she lived up behind the shed, near the house, where she kept company with the neighbor's horse. When we painted the shed, we moved her back down to the barn, having set up a pen behind the stallion run--and there she stayed, happily surrounded by horses and dogs, right in the middle of all the activity. Last summer in the Great Revamp, her pen was expanded into a garden apartment: a separate small pen into which she would move when we had horses in the larger pen (and Pooka was in there twice a day during the morning and evening turnout-switching shell game). The rest of the time she had the apartment to herself.
When I moved in, the seller said she had maybe a couple of years to go--she was not young then; the vet estimated her age at no less than 6 or 7 and possibly more, and her mastitis was acute. That was in 1994. Which means she lived to be 18 at the very least, and possibly 20 or more--ancient for a goat; their lifespan is about that of a dog (12-15 years). She was a tough old thing and she went out in her own time and in her own way. I hope, when it's time, I'm allowed to do as well.
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 03:28 pm (UTC)She sounds like she went out as someone who deserves to be remembered. And I can think of no better epitaph than that.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 03:41 pm (UTC)Well said.
Sounds like it will be quieter around DHF. Will she have a successor, or will she remain The One and Only Goat?
All Things Go to Heaven
Date: 2006-03-06 11:54 am (UTC)That means everything, down to the last blade of grass.
Lori Coulson
Re: All Things Go to Heaven
Date: 2006-03-06 12:01 pm (UTC)(now there's a philosphical question to keep a sacerdotal conclave busy for a while...)
no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 03:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 03:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 03:48 pm (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 03:53 pm (UTC)She sounded swell, and you allowed her a good life. There are blessings in that.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 04:27 pm (UTC)*satute to The Goat*
Date: 2006-03-05 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 12:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 04:55 pm (UTC)It says much about your generosity of heart and true spirit that you kept her healthy and crankily happy for so long, when you didn't get along so well. I'm sad to say I know people who wouldn't have done so much for "just an animal."
no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 06:20 pm (UTC)And, to add to what someone said upstream, there are PEOPLE who haven't been given so comfy a life, so good for you.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 06:31 pm (UTC)Chere lost hers, earlier this year; probably they're grazing happily somewhere sharing stories about horses brown and white.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 07:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 06:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 07:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 07:51 pm (UTC)Blessings to the Goat and to all on your farm.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 08:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 03:25 am (UTC)A Musical Instrument
poem by Elizabeth Barret Browning
What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
High on the shore sat the great god Pan
While turbidly flowed the river;
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.
He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river!)
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.
"This is the way," laughed the great god Pan
(Laughed while he sat by the river),
"The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed."
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain, --
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.
Rest ye well Juno Whitegoat.
-=Jeff=-
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 06:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 06:21 pm (UTC)"Seeking experienced brush goat for new position"...
Best wishes--
no subject
Date: 2006-03-07 02:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-07 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-07 08:14 pm (UTC)