Hearth by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2018-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

What It Will Bear

FRANK STEWART

I settled in the Hawaiian Islands in 1966, married a local girl named Lisa, and began raising a family. A few years before our daughter, Emma, was born, Lisa and I bought five acres of old pastureland on the lower slopes of Mauna Kea, a broad, snow-capped volcano that filled the horizon. We built an off-grid farmhouse, and soon after purchased two young goats. Lisa was pregnant at the time, and while we liked the idea of organic milk and homemade cheese, we never thought we’d make a living from the goats: we had mainly wanted the pastureland and open spaces and never intended to be full-time farmers. As for goats, we’d learned to appreciate them because of our neighbor, Dean, who was a real homesteader and kept several dozen long-eared Nubians on his farm.

Two years after we bought the land, one of our does was ready to deliver her first kids. Like twitchy grandparents, we fretted over how Buckwheat would ever manage on her own. We cleaned out the barn, rebuilt the manger and stanchion, and partitioned off a birthing room. Should we sleep there, with lanterns and a veterinary kit, in case she needed help in the middle of the night?

Goats almost always bear twins, and as it happened, Buckwheat delivered two black-and-white babes at 9:30 on a sunny Saturday morning. By the time we got to the barn, the kids were nodding and murmuring around Buckwheat’s hooves in the wet straw. Twenty minutes later, they were on their feet, staggering right and left, wagging their tails, and learning their way around their mother. In a week, the kids were too high-spirited to be kept in the birthing room. Out in the paddock, they bounced and kicked up their hooves from one end to the other.

I remember standing inside the fence one afternoon when Emma was eighteen months old. She could already tell that the kids were creatures not much different from herself, only more independent and willful. She waded through the toddler-high grass and shrieked in ecstasy when they came bouncing by her, ears flapping, legs flying in all directions. She was impressed. Glancing over, I saw her becoming distracted by some dark-chocolate, marble-sized balls she’d noticed on the ground. From a distance, Lisa and I watched her pop a couple in her mouth. In a flash, Lisa was beside her, popping them back out.

A week later, we put the kids into the larger pasture so they could feed and roam in the waist-high grass. Goats are smart, especially about finding the food they like; they’re serious about browsing and don’t do much sightseeing. On occasion, though, before they returned to the barn at dusk to bed down, I would see them pause and gaze about with a dreamy look in their eyes, as if assessing how big the world was, how much of it was theirs, and how far they could ramble. Could they see Dean’s farm up the hill, where the

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