As my belly begins to expand with another pregnancy I wonder again why God ever thought this would be a good process. I'll secretly admit to having a bit of drama queen inside of me, and this weakness leads me to be convinced every time I find myself in the first trimester of pregnancy that I may, in fact, be dying. The other night I was in a special state of misery, fighting the urge to moan and cry out loud, when I remarked to my husband - "You know, its odd that pregnancy doesn't affect animals like this." He began to agree; but then we remembered Micah.
A couple years ago we ran across a family who had 4 goats they wanted to get rid of. We weren't expecting anything special, but maybe some decent additions to our commercial meat herd, so we were surprised to find four solidly built high percentage Boer does. We only had $100 to spend at the time and asked if they would accept that amount for one of the girls (our minds racing frantically trying to decide which one to choose!) Their reply? "Take all four of them for that sum!" We were on cloud nine.
We got them home and proudly looked over our $25 does. Maude had sheer bulk, Bentley had refined beauty, Reba was a solid red Boer with loads of personality....and then there was Micah. She was nice enough, but skittish and lacking the strong qualities of the others. Furthermore, she was carying a heavy worm load which was set off by the stress of moving and we spent many touch and go hours with her for the first week. Yet she lived, we got on top of the worms, anemia and other deficiencies and as the weeks passed she filled out and really came into her own. After a few months it was clear that she was by far the nicest and most valuable goat out of our four new acquisitions! And, oddly enough, since her initial fight with stomach worms, she had been one of our most parasite resistant animals and seldom needs deworming. Add that factor to her muscular build, placid demeanor and the fact that she maintains (and gains) weight on pasture and mineral alone and she was exactly the type of genetics we wanted to further in our herd. She had been exposed to a buck when we bought her and we waited with baited breath.....and she was open. We figured that was understandable due to the weak condition she was in when we bought her and with hopeful hearts we sent her off for breeding with the rest of our herd in the fall.
Yet as winter's cold retracted and the does' bellies expanded, Micah again remained slab sided. We knew she was cycling, we had visual confirmation of her being bred...it was disheartenting. We had many talks about what to do with her - pay the vet bills to find out exactly what was wrong, send her to the sale barn, keep her as a companion animal, on and on. And, as we deliberated the months passed. Fall arrived and we decided to try one more time. We waited weeks and the buck failed to ever even show interest in her, our last hope had been shot. Yet one brisk November day we noticed the beginnings of an udder! Within another week we were sure, she was bred, apparently in the summer by a young buckling pre-weaning. (Never trust teenagers!)
This is when the real drama began. Obviously, as we were unsure of a breeding date, we were clueless as to a due date. With her bag filling rapidly we waited expectantly for the arrival of her kid/s. As for Micah herself, she seemed convinced that she could not imagine surviving another day of pregnancy. Yet this state remained for weeks. With her eyes almost visibly rolling in despair she would waddle around the barn lot being as cranky as possible. A warm barn on a winter night is a lovely thing; normally one can smell the sweet hay, feel the warmth from the animals' bodies and hear their peaceful quiet breathing as they slumber. Yet for the month of December that near silence was broken by the moans of Micah. While she slept she emitted a pitiful groan with each exhalation - continuous and unrelenting. We checked her for everything: pregnancy toxemia, structural unsoundness, etc. yet through it all she remained "normal" - just a miserable drama queen.
It was a happy late December morning when she finally kidded. She was welcomed into a freshly bedded post-partum stall and while she happily sucked down warm molasses water we collected her kids from where she had stashed them under a feeder. We climbed under and were amazed to see two stoutly built kids - they were less than an hour old, but as big as two week old kids. We gently lifted them out and were further amazed by the presence of a third, just as big, hiding behind its siblings. With joy we set them into the stall, one after another. Micah began to sniff at them, first at one, then another would bleat and attract her attention, then another bleat and her attention was attracted elsewhere. Her bewilderment was obvious, as if it was dawning on her that these really were all hers, and I believe she began to realize that she had simply traded the misery of pregnancy for a misery that would be much more chaotic.
No comments:
Post a Comment