Life doesn’t stop just because one’s circumstances are in limbo or one’s health takes a surprise downswing. Time passes. Things happen. When we arrived at Mom’s, we had 13 chickens and 2 ducks. By the time a few months had gone by we had buried several chickens and hatched out 4 new ducks. Our original female duck was also sitting a nest with 18 eggs in it.

Sadly, about a week and a half before hatching day, our Mama duck was killed on her nest by a raccoon sometime in the night. The eggs were stone cold by the time we found her in the morning, and a few had been broken in the attack. Expecting nothing, I candled the unbroken eggs and was shocked to find they were all still alive. Out came the incubator again, and we waited to see what would happen. Out of 12 eggs, 9 hatched. The ninth was dwarfed and stunted and lived only a few days. She was very very sweet and very brave, but just not strong enough to survive. She died in my hand late one night, and I am not at all ashamed to say I cried like a child over her.

In this waiting time, I was also amassing trees and garden plants for the eventual homestead. I had brought some with me, dug up from the old house before winter, and by the time summer was in full flush, my incipient orchard was fairly extensive. I had neither house nor land, but by golly, I had plans and the beginnings of a most respectable orchard. Fruit trees and shrubs, nut trees, herbs, shade trees and medicinal plants, all carefully gathered in pots and tended daily.

One of the animals I had always liked and planned to have in the dreamy ‘eventual’ time when land allowed was dairy goats. Goats are hilarious little buttheads with a huge amount of character, and they do an immense amount of work in terms of transforming scrub land into pasturage. One day, I got a message from a friend: there was a goat up on the homesteading sites, free to a good home. Did I want a goat? Well, I had no infrastructure for a goat; no pen, no hut, no feed, no idea what a goat needs. However, I do have a friend who has all of those things. She offered to serve as a boardinghouse, so we went out and brought Lucy home.

So much to learn, having a goat for the first time. Free animals usually have issues, and Lucy was no exception. She had mostly spent her life around horses, not other goats, so her behaviour was not “normal” for a goat. Antisocial, pugnacious, and entirely unimpressed with her new surroundings, she made us work for acceptance. The day she finally offfered her head for a scratch was a big day. I hadn’t milked a goat in easily 20 years, so relearning those skills, dealing with the minor injuries and illnesses that livestock acquire, it was a lot to learn.

Goats are herd animals, though. So ONE goat is not usually a good thing. I kept my eye on the sites, and a few weeks later, baby Maggie joined our herd

Maggie taught us new lessons. Namely, the heart-pounding terror when things go wrong. With all the change – new place, new people, new feed – her rumen shut down, and she developed the dreaded Bloat. Goat Bloat is deadly if it isnt dealt with swiftly. A swift visit to the large-animal ER, a pumped stomach, and several days in the animal hospital hadn’t exactly been in the plan, but at the end of it, Maggie was healthy and back home with us.

Unfortunately, Lucy hates Maggie. And Lucy is older, bigger, and has full horns. So Lucy and Maggie have had to be kept seperate from one another. Their pens share a fence, so they can see, smell and interact with each other, but Lucy can’t beat Maggie to death. Once Maggie is full grown, we’ll have to let them work out their differences, but for now, they are together but not.