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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