A Woman Who Stares At Goats

Friday was a beautiful yellow day. After going to portraiture class in Otane in the morning I came home to lunch and discovered that Tikokino School had rerun two of my advertisements I'd placed the previous week in their newsletter. I had vowed that this would be my last attempt to advertise for my missing goats as I had exhausted every avenue I could think of.

In the middle of the afternoon I found a phone message from someone at Gwavas Station saying that four goats were living on a cliff. I spoke to a manager who said that there were two white and two fawn goats and they'd been living there for two to three months. He had been going to shoot them but one of his friends said he'd read somewhere that someone was looking for their pets but couldn't remember where he'd seen it. Of course then my ad was rerun in the newsletter and the rest is history.

Saturday morning it was pouring with rain. Rose and her husband Matthew arrived in their four wheel drive and we made our way down State Highway 50 to Gwavas Station. We were met by a very nice guy on a motorbike with a fox terrier riding pillion. We followed him across the road and into a bumpy paddock then through a gate into another bumpy paddock. By this stage we were overlooking a steep gorse covered cliff to the east. We waited while Casey drove his motorbike down a hill in order to scare the goats out of cover and up into view.

I saw four fat hairy goats break out from the trees and start to run vertically up the cliff face. I tried to look at them through some small binoculars but couldn't make out any collars although one of the fawn goats seemed to resemble Xena. Rose and I were sure it was too much of a coincidence that four long haired goats should be there a few months after mine went missing but I was at a loss as to why two had changed colour.

Casey came back and asked where I used to live. I told him and we worked out that Xena must have gradually brought the herd along the river, under the bridge (or even across the highway) before finding shelter on the cliff. She was probably only 10 kms from where I now live so I try to fool myself she was trying to find me. He said he would ring the neighbour whose farm abutted Gwavas and ask him to help muster them down and into the sheep yards so I could collect them. I thanked him and thanked him again, unable to believe that after nine months I'd finally found them again. Note to self: make offering to the guardian angel of goats who looked after them all these months.