Solstice Day - Bye-Bye Billy

The billy goat went away today. The nannies all cried and walked him to the gate. It's been years since we've used a full-sized billy goat for breeding. Usually we have some adolescent kid, and we are never really sure if he is tall enough to get the job done. (But he always was.) This time the available billy (which primarily means free for the cost of transport and boarding him while he was with us) was this strapping fellow. The nannies were used to rushing out to pounds heads with and beat up the new boy. They stopped their grazing and ran up and ... whoa! Who is THIS! The girls all turned and ran away, then stood in little groups twining their necks together, oggling him and whispering to each other. Whenever we had friends over we had to drag them up to the goat paddock to look at Rothomund (I think that was his name), secretly hoping he would do something dramatic and romantic like piss on his long flowing gray beard. He was also something to smell. We could smell him all the way down the hill to the house. Ronan - age 10 - said she often gotten a big powerful whiff of him while she was swinging on the swing under the Bear Tree. (More on the Bear Tree in a later post.) Rothomund was also quite a gentleman - for a goat. He always took "no" to mean no. And even "no no, well, maybe ... no, not yet" as not yet. We humans had to watch for those horns in confined spaces in the stalls, but he was never the least bit aggressive, even when O'un, Venus, and Joy went in heat and he was very much preoccupied with snorting, stamping, lip-curling, charging about suddenly, sniffing privates ...etc.. It almost made us want to keep a billy someday. Almost. But he ate a lot. And like a lot of male farm animals he is only of periodic use, before and after which he would be a fencing and management headache. So back home he went. We weren't the only people who thought he was something, apparently. When Matthew picked him up at a friend's farm in Oakland, Oregon, people were pointing and gesturing to each other in passing cars. When he took him back, some car pulled over to the side of the road and then later passed him, snapping pictures of billy in the truck as they went. I suppose those pictures will appear on someone else's blog somewhere.