Think Like a Goat

Part One · The Latch

Hazel had been staying at her aunt's place on the hillside for nine days. In that time she had learned two important things about goats. The first was that a goat did not care in the slightest what you wanted. The second was that a goat always knew exactly what it wanted, and it wanted it immediately. Aunt Bea kept nine of them in a pen below the orchard, with a tin-roofed shed at one end and a water trough at the other. Every morning Hazel carried the grain bucket down the path, and every morning nine heads came up together. Nine pairs of yellow eyes, all pointed directly at the bucket.

The oldest goat was called Clementine, and she was the one to watch. Aunt Bea mentioned this on the first morning, and she repeated it every single day after that. Clementine was brown and gray, with a long serious face and a beard like an elderly professor's. She was the only goat who never hurried to the bucket. She walked, slowly and deliberately, and the others allowed her to pass. When she stopped, they stopped. When she lifted her head and studied the hills, eight other heads lifted and studied the hills too. Hazel thought she resembled a teacher who had seen everything and was not impressed by any of it.

On the tenth day, Aunt Bea had to go and help a neighbor move his hay before the weather turned. She stood in the kitchen with her truck keys and gave Hazel exactly one responsibility. "The goats come in by five," she said. "Rain tonight, serious rain, and they absolutely hate being wet. Grain in the bucket, goats in the shed, hook on the gate. That's everything." Hazel promised that she could manage that, and Aunt Bea considered her for a moment, the way Clementine considered the hills. Then she nodded, and the truck went bumping away down the hill, and Hazel was officially in charge of nine goats.

The morning went perfectly well. Hazel fed the hens, weeded the bean rows, and read on the porch with her feet up on the railing. By two o'clock a gray lid of cloud had settled over the distant hills, and by three it had slid closer, until the air felt heavy and unusually still. She decided to bring the goats in early, which seemed like exactly the kind of decision a responsible person would make. She filled the bucket with grain and walked down the path, swinging it slightly so that it rattled invitingly. Nine heads should have appeared. The pen was completely empty, and the gate stood wide open.

The latch on the gate was not broken. It was a plain iron hook on a chain, and it hung there swinging gently, as if somebody had only just released it. Hazel stood there and worked it out. Clementine had done this before. Aunt Bea had explained it on the second day: the old goat could lift a hook with her lip, and she only bothered when she had somewhere particular to be. There was a path of flattened grass leading up through the orchard, and from somewhere above it came the unmistakable sound of leaves being torn off a plant. Hazel knew, with a sinking feeling, precisely which plant.

Part Two · The Chase

The goats were in the beans. All nine of them stood in the long rows that Hazel had weeded that morning, pulling the plants up by the roots and chewing them with their eyes half closed. Clementine was in the middle, eating as slowly as she did everything. When Hazel came through the orchard gate, eight goats looked up, and Clementine did not bother. Hazel shouted, which accomplished nothing whatsoever. She waved the bucket, which persuaded two of the younger ones to trot toward her and then reconsider. Then she did what anybody would have done, and what Aunt Bea would certainly have told her never to do. She ran directly at them.

A goat that is chased does not go where you want it to go. It goes everywhere else. The younger ones scattered through the beans like water through fingers, bleating with what sounded remarkably like joy. Two went over the low wall into the orchard. One went underneath it. A white goat called Daisy galloped straight past Hazel, around the shed, and up onto the roof of Aunt Bea's elderly car, where she stood with her hooves spread and looked extremely pleased with herself. Hazel pursued the nearest goat for five minutes and never once got within an arm's length of it.

By four o'clock she had relocated exactly one goat, and it had immediately moved back. Her legs were scratched and her shirt was plastered to her back. The air had gone so completely still that she could hear a fly on the opposite side of the orchard. The first drops of rain fell on the leaves above her head, fat and slow and widely separated. The goats did not appear to notice, and Hazel sat down on the orchard wall and simply observed them. For the first time all afternoon she was not chasing anything, and for the first time all afternoon the goats were not running.

She attempted being sneaky next. She crept up behind the smallest goat, a brown one called Pickle, with the bucket extended in front of her like a present. Pickle allowed her to get close. Pickle allowed her to get very close. Then, when Hazel reached for the collar, Pickle hopped sideways with all four feet at once and returned to eating as if nothing whatsoever had happened. Hazel heard herself produce a sound she had never produced before, somewhere between a laugh and a growl. The rain was arriving harder now, pattering on the bean leaves, and the entire hillside smelled of dust and water.

That was when she gave up, or something resembling giving up. She put the bucket down and observed the goats instead, and she observed them for a long and surprisingly peaceful time. The younger ones wandered, but they never wandered far from Clementine. When the old goat took three slow steps toward the orchard wall, the entire herd drifted after her like leaves on a stream. When she paused to pull at a weed, they paused too. Hazel had been chasing nine goats all afternoon. She understood now that there was really only one goat, and the other eight were simply following her around.

Part Three · The Bucket

Hazel thought about Clementine, and about what Clementine actually wanted. The old goat did not want to be chased, which was reasonable, and she certainly did not want to be grabbed. She had come up here for the beans, and she had eaten most of them, and now the rain was falling steadily on her back. Aunt Bea had said the goats hated being wet. There was a dry shed at the bottom of the hill with a tin roof and a bucket of grain beside it. Clementine knew all about the shed, because she had lived in it for eleven years. Perhaps, Hazel thought, the trick was not to catch her at all.

She picked up the bucket and walked back down through the orchard, past the open gate, all the way to the shed. She did not look back once. At the shed she rattled the bucket, three generous shakes, exactly the way she did every morning. Then she poured the grain into the long wooden trough, slowly and deliberately, so that it made the particular musical sound that grain makes. She propped the gate open with a stone. And then she walked around the opposite side of the shed, settled on an upturned crate underneath the edge of the roof, and did the most difficult thing she had done all day. She waited.

Nothing happened for a long time. The rain came down harder, drumming on the tin roof above her head so loudly that she could not have heard a goat if it had sneezed beside her. She counted to one hundred, and then to one hundred again. She was on her third hundred when a gray shape appeared around the corner of the shed. Clementine walked past her without even turning her head, the way a queen walks past a guard. She went directly through the open gate, directly to the trough, and lowered her long face into the grain. Behind her, in a wet and muddy procession, came eight more.

Hazel waited until the last one was through, and then she got up, slid the gate shut, and dropped the hook into its ring. Her hands were trembling slightly, and she was not certain whether it was from the cold or from something else entirely. Inside the shed nine goats steamed and dripped and crunched contentedly. Daisy had a bean leaf attached to one ear, and Pickle was already lying down in the straw. Clementine finished eating, lifted her head, and regarded Hazel through the rails for a long moment with her strange yellow eyes. Then she sneezed, once, and turned away.

Aunt Bea's truck came up the hill a little before dark, its headlights swinging across the wet grass. She discovered Hazel on the porch with a towel around her shoulders and a mug of something steaming. She looked at the orchard path, and at the bean rows, which were not rows any longer, and at the nine shapes moving behind the rails of the shed, and finally at Hazel. "She lifted the hook," said Hazel. "I chased them for an hour, and then I stopped." Aunt Bea settled on the step beside her, and for a considerable while neither of them said anything at all.

"Nobody catches Clementine," Aunt Bea said eventually. "You can't push a goat, so you have to think like one, and then you have to be more stubborn than she is, and that takes most people years." She nudged Hazel with her elbow and disappeared inside to organize supper. In the morning the rain had stopped and the entire hill smelled new. Hazel went out early with the bucket and stopped abruptly on the top step. The hook hung open on its chain, and the gate stood wide. And nine goats stood in a quiet, patient row at the bottom of the porch steps, looking up expectantly at the kitchen door.