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When I’d finished as much repair work as I could on the fence, I went down to look at what was going on. Of course, there was another broken batten. The animals were all further along well past the gate, so I took a chance, opened the gate and set out to drive The Pretender down to be with the others.  Laying out a $7 waratah every time they broke a batten was starting to wear a bit thin.

We circled a couple of times - with me tripping and hopping round among the cushions of prickly gorse and trying to keep an eye on the does and Moz in the paddock below at the same time.  Just when I thought I had him heading through the gate, The Pretender veered off to the side and instead Rheema came hurtling up through it at a full gallop before I could stop her.

Fuming, I ran forward and slammed the gate shut.  My calculated risk had gone to custard on me.  One step forward, two steps back. What to do now? 

Never give up, they say.  Without very much hope, I followed Rheema as she moved off along the fenceline into the gorse and tea-tree where I had just been working.  Humans are at a huge disadvantage in those conditions, but I managed to flush her out and back down towards the gate.  When I got there, Moz was quite close to the gate and obviously intent on reclaimimg control of his harem - so I opened it to let him through, closing it quickly on Rheema’s kids and Dawn.  I slipped back through the gate myself, and as I turned to shut it I realised Rheema had decided two bucks were far too much and was coming towards me, with Moz and The Pretender hot on her heels.  She really didn’t want to be with those boys, because she came straight to me and slipped through the gate as I called out, “Come on, girl!” and opened it for her. I slammed it tight against the two males, full of glee that I’d turned the tables. “You two can just jolly well go off and fight it out!”  I told them.

And that’s what they did.  All evening as I worked below I could hear the clash of horns, and see them struggling, heaving and grunting as they pushed one another back and forth across the paddock. I couldn’t help wondering if Mozilla might be the loser.  His young son seemed to have a heavier bodyweight and, coming straight from the bush, was in better condition than his father.

I was sorry it had come to this, but I had reached the conclusion that Moz had to go as well.  This was a perfect example of the problems of dealing with wild stock, and I wasn’t about to go that route.  In all honesty Mozilla has probably done his dash here from a breeding standpoint anyway, and he’s not an easy buck to deal with at the best of times.  I would be better off to winter through the does on their own, and buy a Boer buck kid that I could raise to be tractable, rather than carry on dealing with wildness in my herd.

So while the two top guns were battling it out up towards the bush, the young rookie buckling had the two does and the two kids to himself.  Young guy sneaks in to grab the spoils!  One thing I knew, mom wouldn’t let him mate her, and with only the one male to deal with, I felt she would keep him in his place as far as the kids were concerned.

I also noticed that her udder was drunk up and the teats were even, now - no longer lopsided and full of milk as they had been when she first came through the fence.  When kids drink from their mother, they wag their tails - in pleasure I guess - which is exactly what the does do when on heat.  This tail-wagging had been attracting the wrong kind of attention from the boys, who were pretty forceful with their advances. I speculated that now Rheema and the kids had more peace from the males, the kids had been able to get their drinks without interruption - much more satisfactory for her and for them.

Peace descends on the valley.  But who was going to win the battle of the bucks?

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We left the goat story with Rheema safely contained in the lower paddock, and her progeny still outside the boundary fence in the bush.

Next morning as I was preparing to go up I thought I could hear kids calling nearby.  Sure enough, they were in the upper paddock as close to mom as they could get.  To my surprise the two big boys were there too - I had the folorn hope that they might not have been able to get under the fence, but I should have known better - they had.  I opened the gate and let the two kids down to mom.  My next job was to repair that back fenceline.

Actually doing the job is one thing - getting the materials up there is another, on a hot summer’s day, to boot.  I spent some time down below cutting long pegs from some deformed steel rod, and then walked up there with my heavy hammer, a couple of short waratahs, the steel pegs, a quarter-round post and several other lengths of timber. Hot work. By the time I’d fetched a few other pieces of timber and finished the job, with steel pegs and waraths front and back, I felt it was the best I’d ever done with this fence and it should hold.  It was a good feeling that night to think that all my stock were on home ground: now I needed to think around what I was going to do with them - those 2 young males were definitely surplus to requirements, and wild with it.

Next morning I went up to take stock of the situation.  It wasn’t good.  Mozilla and the does had camped for the night in a great spot in the gorse and tea-tree alongside the fence between the upper and lower paddocks.  The two boys had camped on the other side of the fence. 

A curse on male testosterone - the two big bucks had been fighting through the fencewires, and had smashed two or three battens, as far as I could see.  I came back down and grabbed a waratah (my last), the heavy hammer and some wire, and went back to mend the worst break - up near the top where they had slept.  I tried fruitlessly to chase the two boys back up the hill and into another of my fields where they would have had no common boundary with the others, but though they put their noses in, they finally doubled back, and the young buckling, who seemed to have a crush on one of the doe kids, broke through the smashed fence, leaving The Pretender alone in the top paddock.

Things were not looking good.  I knew those 2 boys had to go, and rang a friend from my deerstaking days.  Dave and Cynthia are both top shots, on the range and in the outdoors, and I knew they had plenty of experience with culling goats. I explained the situation, and he said they would sight in Cynthia’s bigger rifle and come up and she would do a sniping job for me - probably within the week.

So far so good, but my fences had to be protected meantime.  And I didn’t want the doe and kids breaking back into the upper paddock either.  So I drove down to town and bought some more waratahs, and some more feed, and followed that with anther hot walk up the hill with steel standards and my trusty heavy hammer.

As I crouched on the hillside in the tea-tree, the gorse and the heat, hammering and wiring in standards to repair as many as I could of my broken battens (seven in all, I discovered), I roundly cursed the bucks.  The last thing I needed was a few more days of this fence-fighting, and I could hear now and then a clash of horns through the fence lower down.  I resolved to let The Pretender down with Moz and the rest and just let them fight it out.

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My previous post incites me to quote some poetry, so here goes. In my first year of Uni (in Zimbabwe - our University College was affiliated to London), I studied Classics, French, and English Literature.

A pox on whoever thought up the curriculum for English Literature that year. We were condemned to study Wuthering Heights, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Mill on the Floss all in one year!  Any one of those alone would have been enough to cast a blight on the year’s study, but all three - well it’s a wonder we didn’t all rush off and drown ourselves in the nearest lake.  Come to think of it, there aren’t many lakes near Harare, which may have been the reason so many of us survived.

Fortunately, we had a brilliant Classics Professor, Tom Carney, who had been a boxer in one of his lives.  Tom knew how to make HIS subject live, and his delivery in class had all the punch of his former career.  So we all looked forward to our time with him, as a break from struggling through the maladies of English Lit.

There was one small gem that I managed to carry away from the English Literature course.  Some of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I can remember with surprise and delight finding out how different his poetry was from the genre of his time in 19th century England.  One of the first poetic innovators, he produced a racy, woven tapestry of words that nowhere more fits his theme than in his poem The Windhover.  I commtted it to memory and think of it every time I see a hawk, which is often. So here it is:

The Windhover
  
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king- 
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding 
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding 
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing 
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding 
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding 
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! 
 
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here 
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion    
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! 
 
  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion 
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, 
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins.

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While I was dealing with the goats, another drama happened - a bird drama, this time. 

About 2 summers ago I made a Cat Garden at the end of the house, using 6′ netting and 4″x4″ posts concreted into the ground.  It was quite a major to construct. The main aim was to contain cats - chiefly my stray Fluffy, who used to wander off over the road until he got hit by a car and lost a back leg (a cool $500 worth of operation).  Given his wandering nature, and my worries about the safety of my 2 Birmans also, I decided to make this garden. 

It’s about 45′ long by 35′ deep on a steep grassy, ferny bank.  Basically, it worked well and though my 2 silver tabbies soon demonstrated their contempt by getting out of it, they didn’t do so very often.

My large workshop has windows looking out onto this garden at ground level - the house is dug into the bank at the back and side.  The cats used to get into the garden off the top of a big bench I have standing in the workshop under the windows.

“Used to” - last autumn I had a tragedy involving my young Black Lab and a couple of my ducks, so the remaining 3 female ducks now live in the Cat Garden - Ah me!  In a sense it was an inspired move, because they’ve done an excellent job of clearing out the weeds and wandering jew, which had grown rampant in there. 

So the ducks were a blessing to the Cat Garden.  How come I never got the cats to do a lick of work around that garden? Didn’t I build it for them? Ungrateful, lazy felines!  Well now the cats have to manage in the house - I suspect that overall that’s more of a stress on me than on them, though.

About lunchtime I heard the ducks making an infernal racket - it wasn’t their normal “where’s the grub?” chant.  So I went to look and got a huge shock.  Standing on a rock in the garden about 4′ away from the window was an Australasian Harrier Hawk (Circus approximans).  He was standing side-on to me at about eye-level and though we see them flying round here on a daily basis, I have never been as close to one as this.  He was bigger than I thought.  It was one of those unforgettable moments when I could have wished my eyes were a camera.  The size and presence of him was something else.  He looked across at me for a moment or two, then spread his great wings and took off.

Obviously this called for action.  I was surprised he had come down into the garden, because it’s overhung on one side by the lower branches of a Norfolk Island Pine, has the wall of our 2 story house on another side, scrub on the two other sides, and a couple of 10 foot tree ferns growing in it.  Put bluntly, it doesn’t offer a smooth flight path. But let’s face it, these raptors are the masters of flight.   

I didn’t have any doubts about why he was there, so I went out with a roll of electric hot tape and laced it back and forth across the airspace.

I hoped it would serve its purpose of protecting my ducks because - funny, comical characters that they are, I love them, and I don’t want any more disasters to happen in my duck world.

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