A Goat Tale

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Me, circa 1996, and a goat with gravity defying ears.

I suppose the opening piece should be the one that has garnered me the most success. This story won 2nd place for prose in last year's "Legacy."

A Goat Tale

I grew up on a farm. One thing many farms have is animals. Our farm was no different. We had goats, lots of them. I was a typical annoying child, and occasionally gave in to the urge to tease them.

Female goats are known as “nannies” and are not fun to tease, because they don’t fight back, they just run away. Chasing them is a little fun, but they run too fast for an average boy to catch. Not unlike human females.

Male goats are known as “billies” and are very fun to tease, because they fight back. Now, when you’re ten years old, you can’t harass just any billy goat, because the full grown ones are too irritable, strong, and soaked in their own body fluids. Not unlike human males.

No, you want to find one that is about half-grown, one going through puberty, so to speak. At this age, the average billy is territorial, aggressive, and willing to fight back, but too weak and stupid to do much of anything. Not unlike human adolescents.

This story is about one such billy goat that I discovered one day when I should have been doing something productive. He was in a pen all by himself, he was about half grown, and he had a look of utter and total hatred on his face. He looked a lot like Satan, actually. Overall, he looked like fun.

I climbed into the pen and spent about an hour annoying him. He wanted me out, but all he could do was butt me with his little horns, which didn’t hurt at all. I remember grabbing him by the horns, spinning him around in a circle, and running away, watching him dizzily hobble after me. This was more fun than Disneyland. However, I eventually lost interest and left the poor goat alone.

I did not encounter him again for some time, until about six months later when I was out stacking firewood. He went walking right by me, out of his pen and apparently having the time of his life. This wasn’t the way things worked on the farm. Billy goats were supposed to be in pens, not wandering around. I resolved to remedy this issue immediately.

I constructed a “goat war station.” It consisted of an empty trailer, and various weapons with which I could attack the goat from a safe vantage point. The weapons consisted mostly of water jugs and string. The plan was to lure the goat within range, douse him a few times, then rope him and lead him back to his pen.

The only problem was that the goat had no desire to pursue me. In fact, all he did was run away when I got close. I’ve already explained that chasing goats isn’t much fun, but I did anyways. I chased him until he jumped into a pen filled with young nanny goats.

This was a pen, but this was not the pen he was supposed to be in. The matter was becoming more complicated by the minute, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I realized the only way I was going to get him out would be to make him angry enough to chase me.

Unfortunately, this task proved difficult. No matter what I did, the goat ignored me. He was far more interested in the young nanny goats. Eventually, I found that shooting him with a high powered watering hose did just the trick.

Now I had one very upset goat on my hands. I also quickly found out that the goat had grown quite a bit more in the past six months than I had. The tables turned rather abruptly.

The goat charged at me with far more speed than I would have appreciated, leaving me only one option. I grabbed his horns, and thus began a very long grappling match.

He pushed me into the corner of the pen, but I kept a firm grip on him. Soon, we both had discovered that neither of us was strong enough to overpower the other. He couldn’t ram me while I held his horns, but I couldn’t escape the pen while doing so. We were at a stalemate. Contrary to what you learned in history class, this is how the Cold War actually began.

An hour had passed. I observed my mother in the distance. Should I yell for help? No, I was ten years old now, man enough to handle a goat without mommy bailing me out.

Two hours had passed. I observed some workers in the distance. Should I yell for help? No, I had gotten myself into this mess and I was going to get myself out of it. It was a hot day, and both I and the goat smelled repugnant, and we were both tired, but neither was ready to concede.

Three hours had passed. My five-year-old brother approached and wanted to know what I was doing. At this point I was really tired of goats, and wanted out badly. The goat was becoming more upset and was struggling harder, as well.

I was about to tell my brother to go away, when a solution came to my mind. My brother could come into the pen, take the goat by the horns, and then I could escape. I could then pull him over the top of the pen, we would both be home free, and we would never speak of the incident again. It all made so much sense at the time.

My brother agreed, got into the pen, and took the horns. I quickly climbed over the fence, and turned around just in time to see my brother being smashed into a fence post, followed by a very unpleasant cracking sound. The goat then trotted away, apparently content with his revenge.

I was sure that my brother was broken, but he managed to climb out of the pen, and thankfully was not seriously injured. I, however, had suffered a rather fatal injury to my pride.

My stupidity in approaching that goat is a lot like the way we fall into temptation. Because I had played with it when it was smaller, I didn’t recognize it when it was larger and actually dangerous.

Satan doesn’t throw large temptations in front of us right away. He’s too smart for that. He knows that by giving into small temptations, we take baby steps towards life shattering ones. He knows that jealously leads to theft, lust leads to adultery, and hatred leads to murder, and he has used this technique to bring many strong men and women down.

And when we are trapped by sin, it is our natural reaction to believe that we can save ourselves from it. I spent several hours in a pen with an angry goat because I didn’t want to ask for help. The fact of the matter was, I was unable to get out on my own and no amount of determination could change that. And just as somebody else took the punishment for my stupidity, Christ has taken the punishment for our sins. We need to rely on His power, not on our own.