While these events were taking place in the pig world, another drama was unfolding on my farm, and perhaps I need to set the scene for this part of the story. Of the many dairy goats I bred in the nineties, I had only three left - Motu, the buck, and two does, Dawn and Rheema - and I had problems with them escaping from my place and going into the forest on the hill above us. Thanks to the hot, dry weather, a post on my back fence-line had eased and they could squeeze under the wires. I didn't approve of this arrangement, but with my mother's illness over the past few years, the niceties of fence maintenance hadn't been uppermost in my mind.
My remaining buck – Motu - is different from any I've ever had. He is a Toggenburg / Nubian cross of my own breeding. His coat is tan, with black long boots and a black stripe along his backline. He has a fairly long, sweeping pair of horns, never having be dehorned as a youngster like all my others, and they seem to be getting longer by the day. Actually he's a fine-looking animal with a top-class pedigree, a good solid body and all the maverick qualities of the Toggenburg breed. He has a mop of beautiful cream curls on his brow that hang down over his eyes, so you can never see where he is looking, and you never know what he is thinking. He is a highwayman. When he was younger I used to wrestle him to get drench down his throat, but I'm wiser than to do that these days. I did not hand-rear him, and he is not tame.
I have had one or two episodes with him, at times when he thought he was being cornered. The first occurred in my big shed when he happened to be in an open corner pen area and without a second thought I went to go in there. He simply put his head down and charged me full bore in the stomach, much to my surprise, sweeping me backwards about 5 feet down a short narrow alley between the rails. Fortunately, I braced myself on the fence and kept my balance, and was able to slide sideways and let him past when we reached the end of the fence. It was a huge shock, and would probably have looked quite amusing, had anyone been there to see it happen.
Stupidly, I approached him again with some feed in a big plastic fish-bin. He took to me a second time. I rammed the bin at him and he cracked it. The problem was, over the years I’ve been so accustomed to having hand-reared bucks that are basically “tame” that it took me a couple of lessons to realise he definitely is NOT!
One day in 2006 at a time when they were out wandering, I came home from shopping to find that Motu and Dawn had come down from the hill and were in my drive close to a set of double steel gates that I normally keep closed. “Aha,” I thought, “here we go.”
I drove through the gates and called them – and they followed me. Dawn is great: she will come, hoping for food, and where the female goes the male will follow. (Don't we all know that?) So I hopped out of the Ute and walked round to get the gates closed. I forgot that my young black labrador / ridgeback cross was running loose.
Grabbing one of the gates, I stepped across the drive to reach for the other one and close them. The buck had turned to watch me. Suddenly - it may be that the dog spooked him from behind, or maybe he thought he was being trapped again - he launched himself into the air down the slight slope and came literally flying towards me at head height. If the gate had been there, he would have cleared it, but I instinctively let go of it and it swung away from me – thank goodness.
All this happened in a flash. I saw his head come down as he began to descend, and he struck me across my right upper arm, left thigh and hip, spinning me round and throwing me down on my left hand in the driveway. When I sat up, he was standing about 25 feet away, looking at me from under his curls. I had bruises for days, but I guess I was lucky that was all I had. You don't come off scott-free from an encounter with an airborne billy goat.
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