Animal News: The Chronicles of Newman and other Stories
Mr. Newman Goat's fashion statements
We've been doing quite a lot of renovation work on the farm, and that has included building and painting fences, fertilizing and reseeding the pastures, and installing 3 truckloads of stonedust around the barn and in gateway areas. Stonedust is like mud. It's something that you simply can't discuss at cocktail parties or even over a deli sandwich and a coke; yet it arouses great passion in farmers. Every farmer will tell you in (quite honestly, way too much) detail just exactly how stonedust needs to be installed: how many inches to excavate, what type of cloth to lay down, what size rock to put in the first, second, third layers, how many inches of stonedust to lay on top, how to rake it and water it and tend it like a garden until it's just right. In fact, all this religion surrounding stone dust had me so intimidated that it took me 3 years to take the plunge.
Well, hey, baby, everyone is in love with this stuff. Derry, who got a bath last weekend and turned into a pure white dog, soon discovered how good it feels to roll in it and is now a decidedly grey dog. The sheep have rediscovered their precious runin shed and spend hours just lolling about on the crushed stone. It's Mr. Newman Goat, however, who has found real creative use for this new element on the farm and has incorporated it into his summer beauty regime.
I knew something was up when I found him regularly sunbathing a few weeks back; that 99 degree weather with 90 percent humidity we had found Mr. Newman Goat perched atop the dog house sunning himself at midday. (Did Noel Coward leave something out in his song about "Mad Dogs and Englishmen?"). Everyone else was huddled in front of the barn fans, tongues lolling out of mouths, panting, and asking me every 5 minutes when winter was coming.
Then came the zebra goat look. Fashionably adorned by horizontal white paint stripes along flanks and stomach with just a dab of white on the nose let everyone know that Newman always knows where the action is.
In retrospect I realize I should have seen that he was working up to his crowning piece. Mr. Newman is not a goat to do things halfway. The sheep, he has been heard commenting, are just as dumb as a box of rocks. Look at them! They just sit there all day, turning their bellies grey; there is no symmetry, no art, no fashion statement whatsoever. (Editor's note: we do not subscribe to the theory that sheep are as dumb as boxes of rocks). No sir, Mr. Newman does not "just sit there all day". He has developed a whole process. First comes the full body roll, letting that cooling dust of the material work its way into his coat, rubbing first one jowl and then the other back and forth, back and forth, ensuring that his beard becomes soaked in the stuff. Finally, he stands up, shakes vigorously so as to remove any of the larger bits of stonedust (it's totally not cool to have bits of stonedust on TOP of your coat), but leaving the finer stuff lodged just under the hair. This makes for a sort of silver-screen-goat-effect: very sexy. A byproduct of this, too, is that it makes a goat slipperier - and a hard to catch goat is a smart goat.
But we already knew that, Mr. Newman!!
Till next time,
Farmer Anne
Star Gazing Farm
http://www.stargazingfarm.org
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