Girl goat

After a series of vicious incidents in the 1970s bush war, the few surviving smallholders in an area near Umtali were forced to leave their homes.  The evacuation of livestock had just been completed when a rather fine-looking goat appeared up on a mountain, above a sheer cutting overlooking the road.  Surmising, of course, that she had been left behind, I made inquiries, only to find that no one in the area owned goats, nor had she been seen before.

Well, she couldn’t stay there.  Apart from the fact that she could be killed for food or caught in cross-fire, goats need company and protection from predators.  Moving her to a place of safety, however, was easier said than done.

For a start she was in a military no-go area.  Civilians were not allowed to go up there, even to have a few words with a goat.

A greater problem was that she proved to be extremely wild.  Sometimes she came down to browse near the roadside, but at the appearance of a vehicle she was off up the mountainside, not to be seen again for a day or so.  For several days I studied her movements with binoculars.

The weather was dry and often hot.  There was a stream at the foot of the mountain, below the road which was a busy one.  Heavy timber trucks, road construction and military vehicles passed every few minutes.  Widely, she seemed unwilling to cross.  Instead, she went over the far side of the mountain, I think into a deep donga where there was reputed to be permanent water.  Somewhere on that side she spent her nights.

All this time I thought she was a billy.  I arranged for Wanda, the SPCA’s pretty little she-goat, to be brought along in their van.  The idea was that she would be led about in a casual way near the road within sight of the wild goat, talk sweet sexy talk to “him”, whereupon he, enchanted out of his mind by her outrageous beauty and provocative simperings, would overcome his nervousness and follow her to a place of safety.

Wanda wasn’t very co-operative.  While being led about she ate too much.  When she did say something it was with her mouth full, which, as you know, is not a good way to get a conversation going.  The wild goat, after an initial distant stare, walked off in disdain.  Only later, when I happened to get a closer look and discovered that “he” was a she, did I understand that scornful sneer.

Armed with a pistol I did some more tracking on the mountain until I found a reasonably accessible place that she appeared to pass fairly frequently.  To this place I scrambled with a container of water, an old bucket, a tin of grain, bran and molasses, and a block of rock salt.  When I slowed my car the goat, who had been within sight, bolted.  I hoped the smell of the molasses would guide her to my offerings.  Next day I was delighted to find that she had eaten all the food.

I did this every day.  Each time, as I left the parked car, I called out gaily, “Come on, girl!” hoping I wouldn’t be attracting undesirable elements as well as the goat, and kept it up all the way to the feeding place.  Once there I rattled tins, splashed water, sat a few minutes and came on down.

My friend Carol, a devoted worker for the welfare of animals, had a month’s leave and took over some of these daily visits, which was a great help, with petrol as well as time.  It would have been better had we been able to take food at the same time each day, but as terrorists were known to be in the area we varied our times as much as possible.

In time the goat waited until we actually parked before running off.  Later she stood at a safe distance and watched us with her head on one side and her long ears forwards.  I talked to her in her own language, which I spoke quite fluently at one time but was now a trifle rusty, and this helped to gain her confidence.  Carol, too, tried a few basic goat words, although once or twice, lacking a suitable phrase book, she said the wrong thing and drew a snort of alarm from our Girl Goat.

 With water now always available, the goat no longer made the long and dangerous journey to the far side of the mountain.  Three-quarters of the way up the sheer face of the cutting was a narrow ledge, only a couple of inches wide.  This was eroded in one spot, making a slightly wider shelf, and here she took to lying, her legs over the edge, while she placidly chewed the cud and watched the traffic far below.

She was often there in the morning when people drove to work, and in the evening when they returned.  Children on their way to school watched eagerly for her.  Several people worried about her safety.  One evening we received a desperate phone call from a stranger to the area who had driven by, to say there was a goat stuck high up on a cliff and that there was no way she could get up or down.  A block and tackle would be needed to rescue her.  The caller was assured that there was nothing to worry about – that two-inch ledge was Girl Goat’s highway!

Among those who noticed her was one of the men who had been forced to leave the area.  He slammed on brakes, got out of his car for a second look and exclaimed, “That’s my goat!”  About eighteen months previously, he explained, he had bought this goat and several others from a distant farm.  Two weeks later they were stolen.  Girl Goat, it seemed, had found her way back this far, and here remained.  Had she come out on the next hill she would have looked down on her former brief home, although by now she may have forgotten it, and there were no goats left there to entice her back.  When he tried to approach her she ran away, as she did from everyone.  He was leaving for Salisbury the next day and so left her legally in our hands.

 We persevered in our efforts to tame her.  We stayed by our cars while she moved, way up the mountain,  towards the food, keeping a wary eye on us.  When she was used to that we stayed on the mountain, each time a little nearer.

One day, when I thought  she was ready for it, I called her to the feeding place, put the grain out for her and sat down beside the salt block.  After about twenty minutes of watching me from a distance, she plucked up the courage to tip-toe nervously over and quickly lip up some of the grain.  Then she fled.

I sat there many times before I could so much as turn my head or move a finger without her bolting.  Carol took turns with me and found the same response.  Up until then we had been putting the grain down on a smooth patch of earth.  Now we decided to keep it in the half-tin so that we could gradually place it nearer to where we sat, and eventually hold it.

It took a while for Girl Goat to get used to the sound of the tin under her chin as she lipped and licked up the food.  When it no longer worried her we placed it a little closer.  The first time I put it down near my foot she studied me for a long, long time.  Then she reached out a forefoot, put it in the tin and hooked it back to a safe distance.

However, by now she firmly associated the tin with the food and soon allowed me to hold it while she ate.  Then Carol tried holding it with her fingers in over the edge, so the goat had to almost nuzzle her hand as she fed.  One would have thought that the next step, to slowly lift a forefinger an inch or two and touch her soft muzzle, would have been a small one.  But it took many, many attempts before she accepted this and stopped jerking back in fear.

There was speculation among the local people that perhaps this goat possessed a spirit, taken from some troubled person by a witchdoctor and placed on her.  Whereupon, they explained, she would shun the company of other goats (not mentioning that she would probably be chased from the herd with sticks and stones, which would account for her nervousness) and remain apart for the rest of her days.  If anyone killed such a goat, the spirit would settle on someone else, perhaps the person responsible for her death, who would come to great harm.

Certainly she was a strange goat.  Before making any move at all she would look sharply over her shoulder as if receiving instructions.  She would stare up the mountain for long, intense moments, giving Carol and I the creeps wondering what she could see up there, our constant fear being of terrorists.  She had a deep, knowing look in her eyes, as if she had seen it all and wasn’t to be fooled.

On several occasions she tried to communicate with us.  Once, while I was sitting at the feeding place, she looked intensely at my face with her head on one side.  Then, slowly and deliberately, she extended her forefoot and drew it back, making a long line in the earth with her hoof.  For a moment she admired her handiwork, then looked hard at me again, nodding, as if to say, “You understand, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.  “I don’t understand.”

Twice she gave Carol her demanding stare, then reared up on her hind legs, presenting her flank to Carol.  Sometimes she spoke to me softly in goat language – which I did understand.

Because of her fear of the least flicker of movement when we were with her, I included a branch of bridelia leaves in my offerings.  She had no need of extra leaves but bridelia micrantha is a favourite with goats.  Leaves, I reasoned, move and swish.  If  I could combine movements of the leaves with movements of my hands she might come to realise that my hands were friends.  As I sat motionless she ate the grain, drank some water, licked the salt block, her eyes all the while on the leaves I held.  To encourage her I nibbled a leaf myself and after a moment she joined me.  We browsed together for a while.  Then I moved my hand to bend a leaf towards her, plucked another and offered it to her and turned the branches this way and that.

It worked surprisingly well and the very next day I was able to stand up and move around without her bolting off.  I went to some fig suckers growing nearby, called her in goat language and bent branches down within her reach.  She came quite fearlessly and ate them.  Sometimes she stood on her hind legs, reached up high with her forefeet and hooked branches down.

Carol and I, who had always visited her separately, now thought we should go together, for at the end of the exercise, neither of us would be able to catch her on our own.  Girl Goat, after some thought and counting of heads, seemed pleased enough to see her two friends at once.

The militia were getting more and more angry with us for going up there day after day, and it wasn’t a good feeling for us either.  But our plans were going so well we dared not jeopardise them by moving too hastily.  “Just keep the war off our backs,” we said, “while we get this job done!”

“Why all this trouble,” they once asked me, “just for a goat?”

“Because she’s alive,” I replied, “and she’s in need.  She’s in danger.”  Undoubtedly they thought I was bats.

We could now work on details for Girl Goat’s capture.  I knew we would have to get a collar on her.  To this end I began holding the food tin at shoulder level as I sat, so that she couldn’t see my hand moving up to scratch under her chin, along her jaw, and later, between her horns and along her neck.

It would have been so easy to dart her, but that equipment is reserved for larger animals than a half-breed Boer goat, and the mountain was far too steep to use game nets with safety.  We obtained a tranquilliser to put in her food, hoping the molasses would disguise it.  When the time was right, soon now, we would tranquillise her, get her off the mountain and return her to the flock where she was born.

We had now been working with her for two months and she had become an institution in the district.  the rains had come, the browse was lush and she was in fine condition.  Everyone delighted in her, our queen of the road.

Then a certain cruel, moronic individual, unworthy of the gift of life, shot her.

I passed her that morning and she was up there on her ledge watching for me.  An hour and a half later, when I came back to feed her, she was standing under a bush at the top of the cutting, her head hanging low.  I knew immediately that something terrible was wrong – and then I saw the 9mm cartridge case on the road.

With difficulty I climbed up until I could see the gaping wound on her foreleg, bleeding profusely, which she was licking.  She grew distressed when I tried to get nearer so I moved her food and water to a place that she could reach, put leaves for her and went to make a report.  We prayed that in her weakened state we might be able to catch her at last, but her trust in us was shattered; this was the hardest part to take.  She hid herself away and we could get nowhere near her.

The next day, to our relief, we could see the bleeding had stopped and she could move the badly swollen leg in a way that showed it wasn’t broken.  On the third day, after much searching, we found her in a very inaccessible place pressed against some rocks where she had sought shelter from a storm.  She looked terrible.  Her flanks heaved as she tried a small answer to my greeting.

We placed food and water as near to her as we could and she perked up a bit, licked her lips and made a move to come down.  Then she looked once, sharply over her shoulder in the old way – a habit she had given up as she had come trust us – and hobbled painfully off up the steep mountainside.  We could not find her again.  It was as if her spirit had said, “No, don’t trust them any more.  Come away – come away!”

Carol and I were heartbroken.  The Umtali Post reported the shooting and we had hundreds of calls, even from people who had never seen Girl Goat, expressing their anger and disgust.

For days we searched for her and watched the mountain through binoculars from every vantage point.  Where I wanted to look, in the donga on the far side, we could not go due to military activity.  I asked if the army patrols might report any sighting of her but we heard nothing.

Late one evening, fourteen days later, a neighbour phoned to say that she thought she had seen a goat above the old place on the mountain.  I didn’t dare believe her.  At six o’clock next morning a stranger rang.

“Is that Mrs Wylie?” he asked, laughter in his voice.  “You don’t know me but I just had to tell you I’ve seen the goat.  She’s back!”

My phone went wild for the rest of the morning.  I think every person who passed that way called me with the joyful news.  In the evening a man whose children were in hospital after a very bad car accident phoned to say he had seen her; he would call the hospital right away and tell the children.

“They’ll be thrilled!” he crowed.  “It’s the best news I could give them!”

For me, this alone was worth all the trouble and the danger.

Carol and I thought it would take a t least a month to regain Girl Goat’s trust in us.  This time I put the food, water and salt in another place. hidden from the road, easier to reach  and where we had some level ground to work on.  If Girl Goat wanted it, she would just have to come and get it.  She watched me with interest from a distance.  I was on my way down when I met her coming up so I returned with her and sat a while, greatly encouraged by her friendliness.

Her wound had healed well but for the first time I saw a big, raw scar on her side immediately behind the wounded leg.  She had come closer to losing her life than we knew.  Nine days later, as we held the tin of food for her and stroked her, with creeping fingers we buckled a strong yellow collar around her neck.  Over the next few days I accustomed her to small tugs on her collar, to the sight and smell of the nylon lead with which I would secure her, and the jingle of its metal clip.

Although still very shy she came when called, but took her time about it, nibbling at this and that and rubbing up and down on one of her precarious ledges.  There is a certain sense of insecurity when you sit in a no-go area singing loudly, “Come on, girl!” for twenty minutes at a stretch.  Warnings for us to get clear of that position become more intense.

On a Saturday morning, seventeen days after she had come back to us, we were ready.  Carol and I went up with the heavily tranquillised food, the lead, a blindfold and stockings to tie her legs.  Carol’s husband Arthur stayed in the car below as Girl Goat would still not allow anyone else near her.  She came to our call in her own sweet time, to our alarm leaving her ledge and walking along the middle of the road as if she was the chief engineer, before climbing up to us.

I couldn’t detect the tranquilliser in the food – but she could.  It took a long time and much encouragement before she had taken enough to feel drowsy.  I clipped the lead on her collar and tied the other end firmly to a tree.  The great danger was that she would stumble and fall down the mountain, perhaps taking us with her.

It took an hour for the tranquilliser to work.  We engaged her in conversation, offered her leaves and tried to calm her when she grew alarmed.  It was a long hour.  Eventually she grew drowsy enough for us to blindfold her and tie her legs with the stockings. Stalwart Arthur then joined us and with some difficulty we got her across his shoulders.  Girl Goat was no lightweight!

Step by precarious step, bracing Arthur against falling and holding the goat’s head, we inched down the mountain to the safety of the station-wagon where we laid her on a deep bed of hay.  Carol and Arthur got in with her and I drove us out to the farm.

There, as prearranged, we put her in a recovery pen, in a position where she could see her parent flock.  Next day she was reintroduced to her old billygoat friend and could talk to the others through the security fence.  Two days later she joined them, safe at last, her adventures over, and settled down as if she had never been away.