Bear Medicine

It started several months ago. "Have you see [this or that] goat today? [He or She] wasn't with the herd tonight." And we'd all try to recount when was the last time we'd seen that particular goat, and then we'd all spend time on rounds trying to find it or its body.

To no avail.

We had too many goats. More than we like to carry on the place. We only had them because we'd been too lazy to slaughter and hadn't needed the meat. Since they cost us nothing, are meat on the hoof, why not? Well, there are lots of reasons why not actually, but anyway. They started turning up missing.

And I went through everything. What about my management of these goats was killing them? For surely they were dead, even though we weren't finding bodies. Could it be worms? I wormed everyone. Could it be selenium? I bought a block with extra selenium and put it where only goats could get to. Never mind that we'd never had these problems. What else could it be?

When they continued to disappear, my mind went further afield. When you hear hoof beats, it just might be zebras, after all. Those crazy neighbors down there -- could they have something against us and us not know it? Job Corps kids with nothing better to do? Teenagers who bust up mailboxes decided to get more ambitious? It wasn't hunting season and besides it would take an awfully drunk hunter to mistake a goat for a deer, especially more than once.

We walked the perimeter. We studied the goats who were left. We searched for clues.

To no avail.

When Hotsauce went missing, I knew something extra ordinary really was up. He wasn't at all sick with anything, he was big and healthy, he wasn't stupid, he wasn't too young or too old. But what was it? No body. No clues.

The goat who had gone missing before him, the kids had found the body, in the creek. Which I thought was an awfully odd place for him to have died. But a few hours later, when the adults went to check it out, there was no body.

So it could be coyotes. Everyone around here blames everything on coyotes it seems. We haven't ever seen or heard coyotes or any evidence of them. Doesn't mean they aren't here, of course. Our biggest predator problem is people’s loose dogs, but we usually catch sight of them before the mayhem and dogs wouldn’t have been able to get rid of the body like that. They are usually too stupid to actually eat what they kill.

Then one of the twins was there when I milked at night but not there the next morning. As soon as the regular morning chores were settled, I went looking. I took the dog with me. Quite often, if you watch the animals, you can get clues as to what is happening around you that you are otherwise ignorant of. So if you are in a field and you see an animal looking in a particular direction, chances are there really is something in that direction to look at. So I took the dog with me knowing that if she went off in a certain direction that I would want to look in that direction.

I went all through the woods. A goat can just be asleep behind a tree and be nearly invisible so I looked pretty hard but didn’t see anything at all. Well, I did note the likely route of getting firewood out of that particular area. I scanned the back field. I walked up to the rise there so I could see the entire breadth of it. It is hard to describe how you look for something that might be dead because it is just noticing something a little out of place usually. Something dead is close to invisible until you are right up on it usually. Unless the vultures have come already but there were no vultures yet.

I walked down to the creek. I so enjoy our creeks. Someone once said I laughed the way a creek laughs. I hope so. In October in this fourth year of droughts the creeks are low but still delightful and full of life. The creek is rocky so I walked up it. Then I noticed the dog had disappeared. I called for her. She came from the direction of the long flat through the woods just off our property and into national forest. She had a goat sized backbone in her mouth. I knew that wouldn’t be the backbone of the recently disappeared but one that had disappeared previously. I kept moving in that direction.

Then I saw it so suddenly it startled me. There in the creek. Exactly where the kids had said the one they found had been, with a bluff on one side and an open retreat through the woods on the other side. A fully intact goat except that it had a hole in its flank and all its innards were laying about two feet away from it. And all the delectable innards, the liver and the heart in particular, were gone. What was left was all the light colored stuff -- the lungs, stomachs, intestines.

Coyotes would never leave that. Dogs wouldn’t do that. Bear. I hadn’t really thought of bear, but we do live in a bear preserve and we’ve seen them and experienced some loss from them before when they ate our bees. There is plenty of mast for them this year, but since they are fattening up to hibernate right now, small fatty goat livers must have proved quite the temptation.

Our neighbors had complained some time ago about property damage on their place and I would now bet it was this bear. I’d bet he is a young male and I bet his territory is getting crowded up on the mountain. I did find a track, and a trail, which was pretty exciting. We talked to the kids about how to get home if they were out somewhere and ran across the bear -- to not run away but to not challenge him either and basically try to get home and I think mostly they’ll be hanging a little closer to the house until he goes to sleep this year. We will probably need to put an electric wire up along the creek to discourage him from coming onto our property and eating our animals. We hadn’t done that since our animals are not tempted to walk off into the woods. I’m not sure what else we could do. We can’t legally shoot him or trap him and the wildlife people are, well, shall we say, yet more stupid government bureaucrats. The donkey should be a deterrent. A guard dog would be a better one perhaps. A fold to put them inside before dusk should work.

Meanwhile, we still have our biggest strongest goats and they are really the only ones we should have had anyway.

the title has a link to a little information about bear energy if you are interested but trust me, living with it is a holy [sic] different proposition than meditating on it