Moonlight Passing

Just yesterday, I was marveling at the miracle of life. How a pile of eggs, that look so much like stones and are so detached from another living being can hold so much life inside of them. I was thinking about seeds, some that can lay dormant for 40 years, holding onto LIFE that can suddenly spring forth under the right conditions.

Today, I am thinking about the ambiguity of death.

I got a call this morning from our neighbors who were on their way to Florida for a little vacation. The night before, one of their goats gave birth to twins. One of them died at birth, and the other was living, but the mother had apparently rejected it. Denise wanted us to go check to see if the baby was doing alright. I loaded the kids up in the van and off we went. Finley spotted the little goat right away, plopped down next to the wall of the lean-to, head drooped over a piece of lumber. I thought it was dead at first, but, no, it's head flopped and a pathetic bleat escaped its lips.

"I don't think it's going to make it," I told the kids.
Finley protested, "We've got to help it..."

So I handed the baby goat to Finley, ordered the kids to the van, and while I made a few phone calls and located the powdered colostrum, they hovered around the poor goat, giving it plenty of attention. We brought it back to the trailer, and I had Finley sit down on the kitchen floor with the goat while I mixed up the colostrum. The thing was so weak, it couldn't even suck the nipple, so I pulled out a dropper and spent the next fifteen minutes or so squirting the replacer into its mouth. It appeared to swallowing a little, so after 1/4 cup or so, I set it down with its head on a towel to let it rest. I figured if it perked up in a little while, I could give it some more, but if not...

A minute or two later, it looked like it was no longer breathing. Finley insisted it wasn't dead, and sure enough, a second later, it's tail twitched. I looked closer, and caught a glimpse of some fur moving gently from the throb of a blood vessel. Another minute, and that movement was gone, too. "It's dead," I declared, though I hadn't seen the glazing of the eyes or heard the last sigh that seems to signify death in movies and books.

And so, quite unexpectedly, I ended up with a dead baby goat on my kitchen floor waiting to be buried, and children begging for some lunch.