He was small and sickly, but determined. And he melted our hearts and ruled our farm.
We’ve had dozens of animals born on our farm, and every so often comes along a critter that is different. Occasionally in a good way.
The first set of twins born last spring to the goat named Coco seemed normal enough for a couple of days until the boy started to struggle. He was weak and could scarcely walk at times, meaning that we carried him from the barn to the pasture every morning.
This was a small burden, because he had also stopped growing in the manner of the other kids.
Nor could he play like other baby goats, who are unmatched for exuberance and pretzel-like contortions achieved while diving off benches, feeders, vehicles, etc. But he was determined. One step at a time he would follow along as best he could, oblivious to any disability.
We named him Charles.
Trying to nurse Charles into something resembling health in light of his many ailments was all but a full-time job. Beth and I fed him extra milk and electrolytes in a bottle, squeezed drops into his sticky eyes and brought him into the house for special treatment including warm showers and medicated shampoo for his flakey skin.
(The 90% of Americans who are not large-animal obsessed are thinking, “Are these two nuts? The 10% who are obsessed are thinking, “Maybe they should have tried installing a hot tub for him.”)
Needless to say, the vet bills piled up — thousands of dollars worth, and sometimes you second-guess your choices. But never with Charles. We spent money on him as emotionally as you would replacing the brakes in your car. It was to his credit that he loved our vet Martha no matter how much she poked and prodded.
We were rewarded as he gradually got better. He would walk to the pasture on his own, sometimes trying to stick the landing on one of those serpentine leaping-gnome gyrations for which goats are famous. Usually he didn’t quite, but he kept trying.
Lacking athletic skills, he focused on the strengths he did have — notably his ability to fearlessly go anywhere he chose. He would slither into the stall of our big horse, Bert, and help himself to Bert’s grain. If any other animal had tried this, Bert would have knocked him halfway to Kansas. But this was Charles, so Bert just sighed and grudgingly accepted this obvious affront to his manhood.
It was about this time that Charles began to get a big head, correctly figuring that he held a special place in our animal hierarchy. He came to demand more and more treats and seemed mildly annoyed that, unlike the dogs, he had to sleep in the barn.
Because of his diminutive size, he could crawl right through a pipe gate and wander about the farm at his pleasure. If the sun was too hot he went into the barn. If he was hungry he slithered through two gates to the haymow.
He was so slippery that he could escape his stall door without us even noticing. You’d push his insistent little self back into the stall, slam the door shut and turn around and there he’d be, standing there wagging his tail.
Charles became the farm’s ambassador. Where the bigger goats would shy away from strangers, Charles would slip through the gate and march right up and present himself. Like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, he was “a friend to all the world.”
We found Charles, peaceful and lifeless, lying at Coco’s side on a recent cold morning. Whatever malady he was born with had, after seven months, finally caught up with him.
It’s easy, I suppose, to make Charles into a cliché — live each day as if it were your last, make the best of a bad situation.
But in the end, he was just Charles. A little animal that never saw the bad side of anyone, because it never occurred to him to look.
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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: How a goat named Charles nudged his way into our hearts
