Total pages in book: 46
Estimated words: 42861 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42861 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Strumpet has her own opinions about my role in her labor, however. She picks the absolute dead of night, when I am fast asleep, to begin having her kids. At some point she makes a little sound, just loud enough to wake me up. When I look over, she’s lying down and doing some very weird things with her body. She’s either breakdancing or having babies.
“Gruff!” I run inside to wake him up. “Gruff! It’s happening!”
He rouses from a deep sleep and makes a grunting sound. “Coming,” he says, not actually moving. I have to trust he’ll come, because I am not staying here trying to drag him out of bed.
I run back out. I’m so excited, and more than a little scared. This feels like everything coming full circle, destiny in motion. Strumpet’s journey to find a buck is what set all these events in motion, and what found me the love of my life. Now she’s going to have babies. Two babies, I remember Gruff saying, probably.
She’s being remarkably relaxed considering what is happening to her and through her. While lying on her side, she appears to lurch like a seal. These are contractions. This is the moment of truth, the culmination of her disobedience and efforts at finding a mate.
Gruff finally makes it out to the barn. He has some old towels with him, just in time for two feet and a tiny nose to make an appearance from Strumpet’s back end. A tiny goat is about to dive into life. Strumpet pushes as if her entire existence has been building to this specific point in time. A head appears and then the rest of a little goat slides free in a splash of goo.
Gruff hands me a towel. “Wipe his nose,” he says. “She’ll likely have one or two more, and making sure they can breathe is a good step toward keeping them alive.”
I crouch next to Strumpet, who is already working on the second baby Gruff predicted. I marvel at this little speck of life already shaking its head. It has a little white toupee at the top, a dark body with little white spots across it.
“Mehhh!” it cries as I wipe the thin membrane away from its face. That cry makes tears come to my eyes. There’s just something so precious about this moment.
“Move him to the front,” Gruff says.
I do as he tells me, and immediately, Strumpet starts licking her baby all over, cleaning away all the bits and pieces that don’t belong to it specifically.
While she cleans, she also gives birth to a second baby. She is so focused on the first, she barely seems to notice. Again, I wipe a little face and move the baby next to its brother. Gruff seems to know what gender they are, though I don’t know how. Strumpet starts pushing again. I look over at Gruff, who is leaning next to the barn door, a smile on his face that broadens to a grin as he sees my astonishment.
“Another one?”
“Another one,” he says. “I’ll bet this one’s a girl.”
This one is smaller than the others. Strumpet barely needs to push and she comes sailing out elegantly, feet first, head demurely tucked. She is white with a little dark toupee, the exact opposite of her brothers. I cannot believe how sweet she looks already as I clean her little face and put her with her huskier, darker brothers.
Strumpet is hard at work now. She painstakingly clears away all the amniotic material, welcoming them to the world with little maternal sounds and eager laps of her tongue.
The baby goats take this treatment with a particular gooey stoicism. If they are surprised to have been born, they do not seem it. Their eyes are open, and they seem to have emerged with their opinions fully formed. When one gets too little attention, it utters a little bleat and Strumpet immediately transfers her licking attention to the noisiest one.
“You can touch them,” Gruff says. “She trusts you. See what she has had.”
It’s not easy to work it out at first. I feel a little intrusive looking where I am looking, but I soon discover that Gruff was right. She has had two boys and one girl, all robust and up on their feet within fifteen minutes of birth.
“She’s only got two udders,” I say. “How is she supposed to feed three goats?”
“She has two teats and one udder,” he says. “And you’ll need to keep an eye on them to ensure that they’re all getting what they need. I’ll show you how to tell. Don’t worry. They’re all good strong babies.”
Right now, I am watching these good strong babies stumble about underneath Strumpet, banging their heads on various parts of her undersides and attempting to suckle from literally any bit of her body that is not actually the teat. It’s as if they’ve all been born with fifty percent of an instruction manual on how to feed, a sort of instructions-unclear conundrum. Occasionally, one of them will nudge the udder, but then immediately dismiss it as an option. Watching this process is an exercise in amusement and frustration.