Miles and I were on our way to a baseball game near Lovettsville, Virginia. A woman braced against a leash which braced against a husky. The dog was winning as the duo careened along the fence line of an expansive farm.
“Look at that woman, walking her dog on a leash on that big farm,” I said. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Dad, we walk our goat on our farm twice a day, every day,” Miles said.
And so we did.
Our goat was our dog. And now he’s gone. Eli died this morning. Frigid temperatures and old animals. He battled, we battled and sadly we said goodbye.
The baby black and white Pygmy goat arrived at the Loudoun Point-to-Point Races at Morven Park in 2011. We were running a horse and my family was coming to see the horse and stay with us for the weekend. Dad and Sheila arrived in his truck with a crate in the back. There was Eli. My dad and my sister hatching a plan to give us a goat. Miles was giddy, naming him Eli Graham. Eli for an Amish man (he came from Amish country) and Graham Motion (because he had a goat, of course).
“They need a goat,” Dad reasoned.
We certainly didn’t need a goat. Or, well, we didn’t think we needed a goat. Black with white markings, a cursive number nine on his side, feint brown lines down his head. Eli and Duchess made fast friends. The one-horned goat and the barn cat. The oddest of odd couples. I don’t know how to tell her.
Hell on wheels early, he came hornless (de-horned), they grew back. Two, then one, then zero, then one. Horses and goats don’t roughhouse well together. There was blood and emergency calls and a lot of hugs. A whippersnapper who never thought he was a whippersnapper.
Miles wrote a story for his school about the day I rescued Eli from a pack of geldings who had turned into a pack of alphas, Eli in the center, butting and spinning as they stomped and pawed. It was like Lorne Green. I threw a bucket of feed into the center of the pack, Eli scurried under the fence and hightailed it back to the barn. When he picked up speed, he would run sideways, like a cartoon character. By the time I got back to the barn, he was curled up in the corner of his favorite stall. He still thought he had them right where he wanted them. We shared a moment.
Eli survived that and several other tussles with horses. The horns came and went, horses came and went, the help came and went, the barn came and went, seasons came and went and there was Eli, a second son, going for walks every day.
Goodbye Eli.
