Dirty Chick (8 page)

On top of this, he is horny. All the time. And by horny, I don't mean that he'll gently rub up on you to elicit affection. I mean that if you're a goat keeper, you're advised to bring
Tasers
and
pepper spray
into the buck pen, just in case you turn your back and that buck tries to ass-rape you from behind.

Now, Peter and I are gentle people. We're both left-wing, gourmet foodies. We like local food, slow food, and most things involving arugula. Since moving to the country, we occasionally read the urban farming blogs, even the wide-eyed ones with no ducks or maggots. “Our goats are so enchanting,” a typical entry will brag. “Once you've seen your baby buckling prancing about with the family dog, you'll love these little imps for life.” And sure, that sounds nice. But no one likes to talk about how that cute baby buckling will grow up to be a caprine sex fiend who rushes you in the barn while spraying clouds of noxious goat piss in the air.

I thought they just made cheese.

So although we were eager to produce some enchanting little baby goats, the whole process of getting Pearl pregnant put me off a little. Serious goat breeders hold the female down while the male checks her out. Sometimes she'll pee on him, and the buck will lap it up, because that's super sexy. Then, after the mating is complete, the buck will stamp around looking satisfied, and everyone will go home feeling troubled and smelling of Satan.

The alternative is to purchase a straw of frozen goat semen, which is thawed and shot up your goat's vagina by a professional, but as soon as I read the phrase
frozen goat semen
, I had to stop reading and think about butterflies.

So we went for option three. We sent Pearl to Love Mountain, a hillside owned by Richard and Jackie, our neighbors down the road. Rumor had it, that land was overrun by a herd of randy, semi-wild goats. Pearl would undoubtedly be gang-raped, with all the ensuing unpleasantness, but at least we wouldn't have to watch.

“How are we going to get her in the car?” I asked, peering doubtfully at Pearl's powerful frame. When we'd picked her up the first time, Amanda had been in charge. But in the few weeks we'd had her, it had become abundantly clear that Pearl went only where she chose to. Just once, I'd hooked a lead to her collar and yanked her in my direction, and it seemed she had the power to tether her body to the center of the earth. No matter how hard I struggled, she refused to budge.

“Oh, that's easy.” Rebecca smiled and pulled out a shopping bag. “We'll just give her banana peels. She loves them.”

Rebecca dangled a limp, brown peel in front of Pearl. Her ears stood on end, and when Rebecca tossed the treat into the back of the station wagon, the goat hopped in there like a happy golden retriever.

“How . . . how did you know that?” I asked, impressed. “And where did the banana peels come from?”

“Oh.” Rebecca shrugged. “I fed her a peel one day, and she just went nuts. So I've been saving them out of the garbage.”

Okay
, I thought.
That's normal.
Now that Pearl was safely contained in the back of the car, we pulled out onto the road and drove the short way to Love Mountain. We tempted her out of the back with a bouquet of banana peels, then unlocked the gate and coaxed her inside. She followed us docilely until we got halfway up the hill and she caught a glimpse of the wild goat herd.

Pearl stopped in her tracks. She bleated softly. I don't speak goat, but I'm fairly confident she'd said, “Holy hell. You people aren't
leaving
me here, are you?”

And then we tried to walk away. Increasingly anxious, Pearl followed us. Eventually, Rebecca and I had to lock her in an inner paddock before hurrying back to the car, closing our ears to the rising sound of panic in her screams. Before I got in, I cast one last glance up the hill. Those bucks were advancing. They had something to give her, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't banana peels.

Once Pearl was away on Love Mountain, we had more time to spend with our rooster. In the first few weeks, he'd seemed pleasant enough. He herded our young hens around the garden, urging them to eat before he did and crowing lustily, pleased at his own magnificence. He was about eighteen inches tall, with clean white feathers and a vigorous red comb. We all agreed he was a handsome bird.

But as he got older, Goldie started to change. Maybe it was puberty, or else he had his own brand of manic depression, but that rooster turned into a first-class cock. I went down one morning to feed the hens, and the next thing I knew, a squawking bundle of
rage hit my leg. “What the
hell
,
Goldie!” I screamed. “I'm
trying
to feed you!”

It's a funny thing that we call them cocks, because the rooster doesn't have a penis. Unlike the duck, with his devilish member, the rooster has a male version of the cloaca, which he touches to the hen's cloaca in a gesture called the “cloacal kiss.” This sounds sweet, and even romantic, but if you've ever seen a rooster mating, you know better. He launches himself at the hen, pins her down on the ground, flutters, and then leaps away. It's not a courtship so much as an assault. It's over so fast the hen doesn't know what hit her.

And Goldie didn't break for breakfast. Whether it was my leg or the chickens, that rooster was fighting or fucking all day long. Or else crowing, which started out charming but got old fast. In no time at all, it was clear this bird was hopelessly misnamed. One morning, I was reading a Lewis Carroll poem to the children when his true nature came to light.

“I'm changing his name,” I announced that night at dinner. “That rooster's name is Jabberwocky.”

“Isn't that a monster?” Peter inquired. “With jaws that bite and claws that catch?”

“Yep.” I nodded, slicing a bite off my steak.

“And don't they cut its head off in the end?”

“Exactly.”

“Jabberwocky seems like a good name to me,” Rebecca piped up. “That rooster's an asshole.”

May gave way to June, and as we approached the halfway point in our year-long rental, we were forced to confront the inevitable: unless we found another place to live, we'd have to move back to town. And I didn't want to leave. We had friends now and a community where we wanted to live. Beautiful Autumn and her French
husband, Patrice; bewildered Abi with her problematic chickens; the elegant Sophia. Even Amanda and her dangerous husband, Nick, were dear to us now. For the first time in years, we felt that we were home.

And yet our rental was for just one year. Katya and Derek were returning in January, and we were pretty sure they'd want their house back.

“Maybe we could hide behind the furniture,” I suggested, eyeing the oversize couch. “We could come out at night and nibble on scraps from the kitchen. They might just think they have a rat problem.”

Peter shot me a look. “That's not practical.”

There was nothing for it. We had to look for a house of our own. But this was a tougher proposition than you might suppose. As I've mentioned, this part of New Zealand was settled by a few large farming families, and their descendants owned massive tracts of land, sometimes hundreds of acres, often worth more than a million dollars. Even if we had that kind of money, these were serious farms, and we wouldn't know how to run them. Raise beef cattle? Be sheep farmers? I didn't know the first thing about either of those projects. I couldn't even keep my horny rooster under control.

“You could run a dairy farm,” Rebecca suggested. “I could help you.” This was less of a shock than it might at first seem. Rebecca genuinely knew a great deal about farming. Never a fantastic student, halfway through high school she had put her foot down and refused to go back to class. Peter's sister Susanne, Becca's mom, had been beside herself. Like an angry goat with her hooves dug in, Rebecca refused to go where she was told. Her parents tried to coax her back to school, then bribe her, then force her, then physically drag her. Nothing had worked. Finally, they threw up their hands. And sent her to the Putney School.

Located on a working farm in rural Vermont, Putney is an exclusive private boarding school where, in addition to their class work, students are taught responsibility and real-life skills by caring for livestock and running the barns. The school produces a steady stream of high-end milk and butter and sells these products for money. The business plan is genius: they hire child laborers, then charge them fifty thousand dollars a year to work for free.

That's my bitter and cynical take on things, but the truth is that Putney saved Rebecca. Instead of dropping out of high school, she thrived at Putney. By her senior year she was “barn head,” which meant she ran a crew of eight to ten student workers, banking a small stipend for the position. In addition to earning her diploma, she learned how to care for animals, manage a staff, and run a small business.

But despite Becca's enthusiasm, I couldn't see us running a dairy farm. Instead, I scoured the real estate listings for “lifestyle blocks,” smaller parcels of land with a house on just a few acres.

A few possibilities turned up. Our favorite property was sixty acres of native New Zealand bush, where a Slovakian architect and his wife had built a pretty little three-bedroom home run entirely on solar power. The land was at the end of an unmarked road and it had no address, but so what? The pictures we saw on the Internet were lush and green, like pages torn from
National Geographic
.

A nervous real estate agent named Kim drove us out there, chatting frantically about the charms of the New Zealand countryside. She almost made us forget we were traveling down steep gravel switchbacks, homemade roads that were sure to flood and wash out in the first serious rainstorm.

Then we met the vendor. Martin was a mountainous man with wild hair and a generous belly hanging over tattered black shorts.
The reason there was no address, he informed us with pride, was that he'd built the house and outbuildings illegally. Not a stick of it had any consent from the city council. It didn't even know the place existed.

“Oh,” I said tentatively. “I think that might be a problem.”

“
Problem?
” Martin roared. “Why ‘
problem
'?” We knew he'd had some complications from diabetes and that's why he was selling the land. I wondered if all his medical problems had affected his hearing. Everything he said was in a yell. He reminded me of an enraged bear.

“Well, I'm just guessing here,” I ventured, “but it might be hard to insure a property with no building consents.”

“
Why
do you want insurance?” he rumbled. “You want insurance, go live in the suburbs. This is the
bush
.”

It turned out that
Go live in the suburbs
was a favorite phrase of Martin's. When we asked about the lack of heat or a telephone, Martin told us to “Go live in the suburbs.” When we expressed a gentle skepticism that a dishwasher could actually be run with power from a windmill, Martin invited us to “Go live in the suburbs.” Through all of this, his wife, Klara, a diminutive woman of very few words, sat nearby and cringed. Occasionally she filled her husband's glass with apple juice.

The house itself was pretty, built with richly varnished native woods, with wide picture windows and a wraparound deck. But it was hidden, not just from the law but literally. It was tucked in an overgrown valley, at the bottom of the death-trap driveway, then off to the side, where it would never be exposed. Martin seemed edgy and threatened by something more palpable and reality-based than our jokes about the zombie apocalypse. The property made me nervous.

“I don't think he wants to sell,” Peter commented when we
finally escaped to drive up the unmarked gravel road. “He didn't really seem to want us around.”

“That's for sure,” I agreed. “What's he running from back in Slovakia? Who leaves their home country to go live in New Zealand and hide in the woods?”

Peter rolled his eyes at me, which I chose to ignore. “Anyway,” I continued, “how does he think he's going to get half a million dollars for a house with no power and no heat?”

“Well,” Peter said, shrugging, “you're in the deep country now. There're some strange people out here. If you want normal, go live in the suburbs.”

But I wanted to live right here, in Purua. And Peter must have felt the same way, because the next thing I knew, he was talking about getting more animals.

“Cows,” he announced one morning. “We need cows.”

“We do?”

He put down his tablet. “Pearl isn't enough, and anyway, she's up on Love Mountain. We need something that . . . makes something.”

“I can make something!” Miranda entered the room balancing a small pile of fingernail clippings on a saucer. “Look, Papa! I made you a cake!”

Rebecca wandered in, still dressed in her pajamas. These consisted of a tattered T-shirt, black sweat pants, and thick rainbow leg warmers made from hand-dyed wool. Sleepily, she wandered to the kitchen and started brewing some chamomile tea.

“Thank you, honey.” Peter took the fingernails from Miranda and pocketed them before they could scatter on the living room rug. “I was thinking something more like . . . a cow. They make milk.”

Silas looked up from the monochromatic towers he was building with Legos, each one sorted by color. “Mih! Mih peese!”

I got up to pour him some. “Has it occurred to you,” I pointed out, “that we just got rid of a cow? Lucky was a complete disaster. She practically got our daughter killed. Plus it's her fault my car smells like poo.”

“Lucky pooped in your car?” Rebecca asked. “How did she even fit in there?”

“Not Lucky.” I shook my head. “Silas. But I still blame the cow. She kept jumping fences.”

Rebecca flopped down on the window seat and warmed her hands on her mug. “She was probably lonely.”