SANCHO, THE HOUSE GOAT

Out in the Hill Country of Texas, people call orphan Angora goats “Sanchos.” Since we had a herd of about 10,000 goats and Angora nannies are notoriously poor mothers, we had quite a few sanchos. My fi rst Sancho was a pitiful little white thing whose mama birthed him and walked away without even licking him clean and dry. With all those white nannies dropping all those wee white kids everywhere, there was no way to know who his mother was. It was February and pretty darned chilly out, so there was no time to wait to see if a mama goat would come claim this pitiful little thing. I scooped him up and dashed to the house with him, fi lled the kitchen sink with warm water to warm him up, wash all the dirt encrusted placenta off him, and then I put him on a towel on the oven door to see if he would revive. Oh boy! And revive he did. In ten or fi fteen minutes, he bounced out of the oven on stiff legs baa, baa, baa, baaing as only a baby goat can do. All around the kitchen of our small ranch house he went. I hurriedly warmed some milk for him, and he latched onto that nipple like a snapping turtle. He was so cute, all white and curly. Well, from that minute on, he followed me like a little puppy. I couldn’t put him back out with those common goats, so he stayed in the house with us. He had his own corner and an old quilt to curl up on, and he settled right in as a house goat. At night, he slept on the end of our bed with us. That only lasted until we woke up one night with him bouncing and baaing all over us, his fi nale being that he peed on me. Sancho was banished to the screen porch at night. Baby goats grow really fast, so it wasn’t long before Sancho was leaping and bouncing up on everything. The morning he bounced up onto the breakfast table and took a big mouthful of sugar out of the bowl, he was banished during the day, too. He was a slippery little booger, though, and as soon as anyone opened a door to go in or out, he would fl y into the house. When the day came that he zoomed in and made two boing boing leaps and landed

on the dining table, burying his cute face right in the middle of a peach pie, he was banished to the barn with the other sanchos. That spring I planted my first garden and a lot of time and effort was spent on it with our hands hauling barrels of water every day from the river to irrigate it. Everything had come up and I was just ready to harvest the first vegetables. We had a fence around the house to keep the livestock out, but Sancho did not consider himself livestock. One moonlit night, I heard “baa, baa, baa,” outside in the vicinity of the garden. When I looked, there was the seasoned escapee, Sancho, standing in the middle of the garden with a stalk of young corn hanging out of his mouth. I swear that goat was making sure that I saw him. I lit out the door in my nightgown, barefooted through scorpion and rattlesnake territory screaming like a washerwoman at the little devil. He refused to go out the gate and I chased him for what seemed like hours. I don’t remember how I got him out. He probably arrogantly bounced out when he got tired of tormenting me. The garden was a mess. He might have been mad because I took his manhood, but it was time for drastic measures. Sancho was old enough to go to the pasture with the other goats, so he hopped in the pickup with me like a dog, and I took him nine miles from the main house to the back of the ranch, through five gates with all the pastures fenced with goatproof fences, and I put him out with a group of his relatives. Carefully closing all the gates behind me and making sure he didn’t slip through, I dusted my hands together with a smug “aha!” and drove back to the house and barns. I bet you can guess who was standing at the back door waiting for me when I got to the house. I tried taking him to different parts of the ranch four or five more times, but Sancho beat me home every time. He refused to live with the other goats, so he and I reached an impasse. He lived at the house like a dog, and I didn’t try to grow another garden, but he was barred from coming indoors. My advice? Never have a house goat.