Of Satyrs and Sutures
We have three goats. As goats go, they are pretty good, meaning they are not dangers to society, but they are still dangers to our sanity. Howie is the goat leader. He is a tall tannish brown goat. I was walking through the dining room the other day and just glanced through the kitchen window when I saw the brownish back of a beast breach above the windowsill like a shark fin breaching the water.
“What is a deer doing so close to the house in the middle of the day?” I thought. Then a devilish head popped up, and I realized it was just Howie, escaping again. We stared at each other momentarily, and then he took off when he heard me coming out the door to detain him. I won’t bore you with the details of his recapture, but I will say one man trying to wrangle three goats on his lunch break is not a fair fight.
In the wrangling process, I noticed that Howie’s back hooves had gotten long, so I mentioned to Natalie that we needed to trim them. Yesterday, being a beautiful day, Natalie and I initiated the process of ruining a beautiful day by hoof trimming. The good news is that we got Howie’s hooves trimmed. The bad news is we spent most of the rest of the afternoon at the urgent care. After Howie, I was trying to hold Ross, the black goat, still against the stall wall while Natalie was trimming. However, Ross kicked and Natalie cut herself on the hand. Blood began dripping profusely, and soon we were journeying to the urgent care.
As cuts go, the doctor said it was a beautifully straight clean cut, or a two inch laceration as she officially called it. One of Natalie’s former students, who is in nursing school, got to stitch her up. Pleasant small talk was had by all. While she was stitching, the nurse trainee said the cut wasn’t nearly as bad as the cut they saw last night on the bottom of a seven-year-old boy’s foot. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get the boy to lie still enough (she said his parents and two nurses were trying to hold him down) to stitch him up, so they had to send him to the emergency room to sedate him.
“I can only imagine,” Natalie said.
“Yeah,” I said, “I bet holding a boy still while stitching his foot is even worse than holding a goat still while trimming its hoof.”
Natalie smiled. Another beautiful day at the urgent care.
I recommend getting a really nervous and self-conscious goat who will chew at his own hooves.