ALASKA STORIES BABY GOATS

BABY GOATS

I learned you have to let the nanny goats have babies so they will give you milk.

In my homestead summer twin black and white baby kid goats were born. They played with us, running, jumping, like two more children.

We went to cut hay in an area where they let you cut it and haul iy away. All the children had a wonderful day. The boys worked and we all helped load the fresh cut grass. I remember a big cutting tool. It was an adventure to go a long way from the Homestead. I remember going to a small store in Upper or Lower Tonsina. I think that is the name of the area. We brought the hay home home and stacked it .... kind of in a stack off the truck in a pile. We were allowed to play on the hay stack before we got it all off.

 We had an old truck, probably a one ton, and you could climb up on the running board, up on the fender, on the hood, up on the top of the cab and slide down the hay stacked in back of the truck. It was a ball! We were all doing it. It wasn't long before the twin goats were following us up over the truck and down the hay. It was fun having animals to play with like that. The animals on the homestead were a treat for me. I was never allowed to have animals in the house or many pets growing up. That's another story.
As the kid goats grew older they played with us less and hung around the nanny goats. That is not a good situation when you are depending on the nanny's for milk. A man from a homestead down the road came by and all the children were put in the house. I remember him joking that his knife was sharp. The boy baby goat was not a baby when he left, and he would not grow up to be a Billy Goat.

A CALF IS BORN

My brother in law Cler built a shelter for Rowdy, our big red cow, and put clean hay in it so she could have her calf in a nice place. The state cow guys would come out and check her. That was interesting ! They would put on rubber gloves that came up to their arm pits and go in side her. They said they could tell when she was going to give birth. All I knew was she did not like it. When the hay was unloaded from the truck it was stacked near the shelter.

Got to talk about RABBITS. I learned that most animals have cycles. Some years there are lots of rabbits and 7 years later there are very few. This year there were lots of rabbits, the adults stayed up nights guarding the hay with guns from the rabbits. We hoped we had hay enough to carry the animals through the winter. The rabbits had run out of food. Men from the surrounding area would come down and help our family guard the hay. The rabbits would come in throngs, hundreds. They shot hundreds of them. They had to use a front loader to dig pits to bury them.

When Rowdy had her calf she broke out of the shelter and in to the haystack and had him there. Through the years different animals had been brought to the homestead to provide food for the family. These had been named by the children and lived to an old age. SO we were told over and over IF Rowdy's calf was a girl that was a good thing. She would continue to give milk and the dairy would get a new cow. BUT if the calf was a boy ..... his name would be VEAL CUTLETS!
More Homestead stories later