Phil and Finn–such good friends. Or so it seems…

“Oh no! There goes Phil into the abyss!”

“Help me, Finn!”

“Are you kidding me?”

Mission: Accomplished

It seems Finn had an accomplice! Nefarious Nan: Finn’s shadowy overlord plotting from the background!

When I went to fill the girls’ water trough yesterday, this cute little thing flushed out of the hose! It was undoubtedly after the crickets and spiders that also whooshed out of the hose. The hose had lain dormant all winter, and the unsuspecting critters were alarmed to discover their home was also a water park.

It’s a skink, and technically I don’t think they’re supposed to live in this area at this elevation, but what do scientists know? We’ve been seeing them ever since we moved to this house, but this is the first time I’ve ever been able to catch one. I think it was a bit dazed from its unexpected water slide, but the second I put it down near the rocks where we usually see these things, it vanished out of sight in the blink of an eye.

Although it is still sunny, wind struck the house with a blast this morning and it promises to only get stronger as the day goes on. So I’m very thankful that Phil and I were able to take the goats out for a nice walk at Graneros Gorge yesterday. It’s not a long hike, but it’s very scenic and the goats love climbing on all the rocks! They had so much fun racing and leaping that they were all panting heavily within a few minutes.

They also took many opportunities to give us heart failure.

The first thing Finn did was disappear over the precipice.

I peered after him and saw nothing but a 50-foot drop and no ledges. I didn’t hear any despairing cries, so I knew he must not have fallen. I called and heard a baa-aah from somewhere below, so I kept calling and walked away. A few minutes later, Finn’s eager head popped up from an entirely different spot along the cliff. I have no idea how he got over there because it looked like a sheer drop-off to me, but I wasn’t going to hang around longer to find out since I didn’t want him to repeat the performance, nor to lead the less athletic Sputnik astray.

Tigerlily is just like her papa–nimble and fearless of heights.

“If I stand on this rock I can be bigger than Dad!”

Our “angel goat” has grown into a big, sturdy girl. At not quite a year, she’s taller than her mother, and compared side-by-side to Finn at this age, I’m sure she would be substantially bigger than he was. She gets along very well with the boys. They are dominant over her, but they rarely pick on her because she simply won’t take it. If someone butts her she comes back swinging, and the boys respect her for it. She also loves going out. The last few times we hiked with Finn and Sputnik, we had a hard time keeping Tigerlily out of the truck. So now she’s coming with us.

Sputnik blended in well with our surroundings.

Case in point…

Sputnik was not photogenic on this hike. While Finn and Tigerlily ricocheted from rock to rock, leaning over cliffs, peering behind boulders, and otherwise posing for dramatic shots, Sputnik kept his nose to the ground as he scurried greedily from one dry tuft of grass to another. They way he gobbled up dead foliage, you’d think he’d been starved for two weeks! I’m not sure I understand his tastes–this stuff was not exactly haute cuisine!

Phil and the crew with Pike’s Peak in the background.

Heading back toward our own Greenhorn Mountains.

Once we got back to the truck, the goats decided they weren’t leaving. No one would jump into the bed (although Tigerlily thought about it). So we drove off without them. When faced with the prospect of staying there by themselves, Graneros Gorge looked a lot less fun. The goats chased frantically after us until we stopped to invite them in again. Tigerlily jumped right up, but the boys were not quite ready to call it quits. We drove on again until they looked fairly tired and then tried once more. This time Finn loaded up, but Sputnik felt stubborn and I wasn’t going to argue with him. This time we drove off pretty fast, and it didn’t take Sputnik long to start panicking. When I stopped for the final time, Sputnik was coiled and ready to spring before I could even reach the tailgate. I expect it won’t take long for them to figure out it’s much easier to obey the first time!

The day  was so beautiful that even after our hike we could not get enough of the outdoors. So we swung by the grocery store to pick up some hot dogs and marshmallows and we had our first campfire of the season. Cuzco was thrilled. He supervised as Phil shoveled last year’s ash and debris from the fire pit, then he waited next to the rock ring while Phil and I gathered wood and got the food together. He never left that campfire all evening. He stood with his face in the smoke, inhaling the delicious cedar smell with half-closed eyes and rapt expression. He hurried over to the house to wait by the patio gate when he heard Phil tuning his fiddle in the basement. Then as Phil came out playing “Goat in the Rain”, Cuzco stayed glued to Phil’s side all the way back to the campfire. He was mesmerized by the music and his nose never left the bow. After the music, Cuzco stood by Phil’s chair and rested his big, bony old head in Phil’s lap where he stayed for probably 45 minutes as the fire slowly died. None of the other goats particularly like the campfire or the music. This is one activity that Cuzco has all to himself and it brings him back to the days when he was the only one.

Sadly, only a week after his first spring brushing, Cuzco’s hair inexplicably started coming out in clumps and now he’s almost bald, the poor fella! Given the current sad state of his usually glorious ensemble, there will be no “Glamour Shots” for a while. We don’t want Cuzco to be embarrassed by his nakedness. Hopefully a new coat will grow in quickly.

But in the meantime, we still have stories which are sometimes even better than photos. I got a new harness today and Cuzco wanted to try it on for size. It was a chill, blustery day and the patio where I normally tack up was slick with ice, so I figured I’d take Cuzco in the cozy basement and try the harness on by the wood stove. I’m used to bringing the girls in every morning to be milked. It’s usually a pretty calm affair: I open the basement door and the goat walks sedately in ahead of me and moseys over to the stanchion with maybe a pause here or there to investigate something on the way.

But Cuzco is not a sedate kinda guy. Purely out of habit, I opened the door for Cuzco like I do for the girls without first haltering him or even grabbing his collar. I might as well have opened the door for a tornado! There was half a box of popcorn left over from a movie last Wednesday that was sitting on a shelf ten feet inside the door. I’d been rationing it out to all the goats over the last couple of days, and it must have had a homing beacon on it. In the blink of an eye, Cuzco tore across the space, dove his head into the popcorn, and inhaled most of it before I could reach him. I tried to pull it down from the shelf so he could at least eat it on the floor (I was envisioning mouse-attracting bits of popcorn scattered behind the shelf from Cuzco’s vicious assault on the box). But this effort turned into of a tug-of-war which resulted in Cuzco’s head getting stuck inside the popcorn box.

I pulled the now-empty box off Cuzco’s head and snatched at his collar, but he was too quick for me. He whisked away and made a lunge for the shelf where he knew he’d smelled animal crackers and peanuts. First Cuzco savaged the animal cracker box. It was plastic and the lid was screwed on. It took him less than half a second to realize he couldn’t immediately access the crackers, so he tossed it off the shelf in disdain and turned to the peanuts. They were brand new, still sealed and sitting inside a shopping bag. I reached Cuzco just as he reached the peanuts. He felt my hand close on his collar and made one more desperate lunge that swept every item off the shelf into a heap on the floor.

I had hold of the collar, but when the goat is as big and strong and determined as Cuzco, and when one is laughing so hard it’s difficult even to stand up, let alone control a raging, 200 lb. beast, keeping hold of the collar doesn’t really make a difference. I “accompanied” Cuzco to the bin of alfalfa pellets where he shoved aside the big jar of Cosequin that serves to weigh down the cheap plastic cover, knocked the alfalfa bin open with his nose, and dove his entire head into the contents. He was buried up to the eyeballs and gorging much bigger mouthfuls of the pellets than he could actually chew. I clung desperately to his collar, trying to pull him out and thinking that he must come up for air eventually, at which point I would slam the lid down and hustle him away. But Cuzco knew my scheme and refused to surface. So I pulled harder on his collar in an attempt to drag him out by main force. Well, I managed to drag him out but the bin came with him. I had just filled it that morning and I watched in horror as the contents slowly began to pour over Cuzco’s head and spread across the floor.

Just at that moment, Phil, who had been laughing at this fiasco from the other side of the room, saw the desperateness of the situation and raced over to grab the bin before it tumbled over completely. I tugged Cuzco to where his halter was hanging, but before I could reach it he shoveled the lid off the metal grain can and almost pulled that one over before I hauled him out with Phil’s help. Once haltered, Cuzco knew the rampage was over and submitted immediately. He followed me across the basement to the tie pole, gentle as a lamb, and stood perfectly during the long, tedious ordeal of adjusting a new harness. That’s Cuzco… whether he’s being good or bad, he puts his whole heart into it.