dancinghorse | Tutelary Spirits

DHF 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

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.