The Man on the Headland by Kylie Tennant

Author:Kylie Tennant
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781743430774
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2012-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter IX

ERNIE had been much taken with the white Saanen goats, which multiplied and bred and now that Benison no longer would drink their milk were purely decorative. The kids sported up and down the fallen pine trunk donated by Uncle Johnny. They would tiptoe into the house by night led by their mother and leap on the table to eat fruit, smashing the bowl as they did so. We would wake up and see the great billygoat standing with his front feet on the mantelpiece while he cropped off a vase of azaleas. You could not leave a door open for them, but they were elegant creatures.

One early morning I came into the bush-house and the queen of the herd was stretched out giving birth. This time she had twins, snowy and immaculate, complete with hoofs and hair, wrapped in a shining transparent envelope. Within an hour they were teetering about on their high-heeled little hoofs. To see these young goats born was almost to be converted to Ernie’s philosophy of Nature, which at other times I regarded as too trusting and optimistic. He was assured that there was nothing this mysterious force he called Nature would not in time make perfect. He altogether overlooked the sinister side of the life force.

“In a thousand years,” Ernie would say, waving the thousand years away with his hand, “Nature will have fixed it all up again.” This Nature of his was like The Mother, it was his divine Sapphira, a feminine force caring for the young, always working and planning and bringing into being. Time for Ernie was infinite. He told us how once he was lying looking at the stars so intently that he felt himself lifted from the earth. I regarded time as something I snatched minute by minute. Ernie and Dimandead might have thousands of years between them, but I had none to waste, was always hasty and distracted. I envied them.

Ernie, hearing me lamenting over damage by the goats, offered to buy them. I gave them to him gladly.

“I’ve always liked goats,” he said, accepting them. “But these big white ones are a cut above the little fellers round here.”

I had promised the animal husbandry expert who sent them to keep the strain pure and mentioned this to Ernie. I might have known he would have a theory. He jutted his beard stubbornly when he heard about keeping the strain pure.

“Now that is not the way Nature works,” he contended. “Stands to reason that the more you cross animals the more likely you are to come up with something new. Don’t matter if it takes a thousand years or so . . .”

“Yes, but Ernie...”

He also had a theory that weeds were good for the soil and should not be removed from between the “furrers”. They kept the soil moist and prevented evaporation. He scorned those farmers who found their soil all dried out because they removed weeds that were doing a good job, sheltering the young plants.

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