Sunday, November 15, 2009

chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

Now while we were at the Richardson farm, Goatie Goo had some adventures that need to be told. First of all, he had grown four additional feet from his hooves to his shoulders in less than a month since the time he had been born. And he was almost a full-grown adult goat when he came out of his mother’s womb that cold December night. He was as big as a horse! And he had gained a reputation for himself also.
Not that he wanted one. He was as quiet as the day he had stood in the stall with his mother. But it’s hard not to bring attention to yourself when you’re such an anomaly. That means he was really different. He was, after all, a blue-haired, goo-haired goat. And he was already six feet tall from hoof to shoulder!
But he didn’t seem to want to cause any disturbance at all. He did seem to be going somewhere when he left his mother and the barn he was born in, but he didn’t seem to want to create any fanfare on the way to where ever he was going. But he did. Now the next part isn’t very nice to tell or to hear, but it needs to be told, because it’s the truth. There were a lot of people, mostly men, just like Farmer Jones, who wanted to capture Goatie Goo. One man saw the goat and ran back to his barn and fetched his halter and the strongest rope he owned. When he caught up with Goatie Goo, who wasn’t running away, just walking his slow, determined walk, he threw the rope around Goatie Goo’s neck. Guess what happened? Yes, of course, he ate it. Same with the halter. The man would have wrapped his arms around Goatie Goo to prevent him from going any further, at least until he could get him corralled, but, if the truth be told, he was afraid to. He wasn’t really a brave man anyway, and he just saw a chance to maybe make some extra money, as long as there wasn’t much danger involved.
Another man, who was a little more ingenious and a little greedier, took one of his chains from the barn. One of the chains he used for pulling trucks and tractors out of mud and ditches. He had already heard that Goatie Goo was headed his way, so he climbed an apple tree he had just pruned the day before and waited. When Goatie Goo walked under the tree, he threw the chain around Goatie Goo’s neck. Guess what happened? That’s right, Goatie Goo ate the chain.
But this farmer wasn’t done. He climbed to the other side of the tree, and jumped, feet first, on Goatie Goo’s back. Guess what happened? HE GOT STUCK! What a silly sight that was. A farmer standing on the back of a blue-haired, goo-haired goat, like he was balancing on a tightrope, or riding on a surfboard. After a while, the farmer figured he had to do something. He was a well-respected man. He couldn’t be standing on the back of a blue goat! It wasn’t proper behavior. So he unlaced his boots, and jumped out of them and onto the ground. He banged his shins and hurt his ankles and wounded his pride. Guess what happened next? Goatie Goo ate his boots! Now that’s justice!
Word of this blue-haired, goo-haired goat got around fast. And if you want to know, or even if you don’t want to know, the thought in the mind of a lot of people was how they could make money. Just like when men first saw the great beasts of Africa and decided they could either kill them for money or bring them home and display them for money, that’s what a lot of the people in this farming community thought about when they heard about Goatie Goo.
One man, sadly enough, tried to shoot him with a very high-powered rifle. Just before he pulled the trigger, he thought what he always thought just before he pulled the trigger: ‘This could knock down an elephant!’ And he was right. The gun had really been manufactured for that purpose, to knock down an elephant. But guess what? The bullet didn’t do anything to Goatie Goo! The bullet just got lodged in his bluey, gooie hair. Then guess what? HE ATE THE BULLET! The man fired several more shots, but with the same result. Finally, he gave up and took himself and his rifle home.
As word spread through the small valley where this story takes place, the men of the town decided to have a meeting in the town hall. That was a place where they met in order to get all of their ideas put together. Most of the time, the town hall meeting was a good idea, and a good concept. But this time, it wasn’t for any other reason but to complain and to devise a plan to capture Goatie Goo. Admittedly, having a blue-haired, goo-haired goat running around wasn’t exactly a normal event, but the goat wasn’t bothering anyone. He didn’t get into garbage cans and turn them over, he didn’t eat livestock or produce, he didn’t steal pies cooling in the windows of people’s houses, he didn’t make noise or wreck fences. All he really did was draw attention. But he didn’t do that purposefully. He was not destructive, he was not loud, he was not anything but a blue-haired, goo-haired goat that was on the way to somewhere and no one could figure out what to do about that. It was just that he was so different and, if the truth be told, most people can’t tolerate different. Most people want everything to be the same and predictable. And Goatie Goo fell into neither of those two categories.
And so the men held a town meeting in the town hall one cold January evening. There was a lot of yelling and pounding tables and not much reasonable talk. If they had heard each other, they probably would have been ashamed. But men who are wanting to do an unreasonable thing normally aren’t too reasonable. They wanted to capture this strange goat—one man said: ‘Is it really even a goat? Maybe its from a different planet come to destroy our town!’ Which caused a lot of shouting and a lot of agreement—and even though most of them knew Goatie Goo had come from Farmer Jones’s own barn and from one of his she goats, that became the general attitude in the meeting. HE WAS FROM A DIFFERENT PLANET AND HE WAS DANGEROUS!
And so then they discussed just how they could capture this goat to either destroy it, or make money from it.
“He can eat right though a barn door. I know that much about him,” Farmer Jones offered after they resolved what they needed to do.
“Guns don’t bother him none,” another farmer said. “I shot him with a rifle that could knock down an elephant and he ate the bullet!”
“Well, there has got to be some way to get him,” another farmer shouted. “He’s a menace to our community and dangerous to our families.”
That is the other thing men do when they’re being unreasonable. They always say they are doing it to protect their loved ones. That always gets people in the spirit. And they all went home that evening feeling much better about themselves and about their prospects. They hadn’t actually come up with a plan to capture Goatie Goo, but they had come to a consensus that he had to be captured, and that was the first step. Most men are used to the idea that if they put their heads together, they can accomplish anything.