Well, I don’t recall the exact details of this story but I’ll do my best and feel free to correct, add, etc, in the comments:
We lived in Ohio I was 13 or 14 and we had several goats. My two white saanen goats were my pets and companions. I fancied myself a type of Heidi, which was one of my favourite stories, and named them both Shneehopli, I believe it means ‘snow hopper’ and Shwanli, which means ‘little swan’. I had always loved goats, I loved their antics, I loved to milk them and I loved how they were such characters. These two goats were super smart and could open door latches and feed bins. Shwanli died because she got into the feed bin and got very sick with diarheea and never recovered. Shneehopli lived longer and had a kid which we innocently named “Horny”. He had horns, so it seemed natural to name him “Horny”. Little did we realize that he was “horny” in more ways than just the horns on his head! Thanks to my father, we were asked to change his name which we didn’t quite understand at that time. I don’t even remember what we re-named him, I’ll forever remember him as “Horny”. I just remember that one evening my dad came home from work and said, “what are the kids calling this goat?”, he had a look which I now understand as a parent myself, it’s that kind of look where you are trying not to laugh at something that would be inappropriate for kids that age to be privy to. But since my mom tried to keep all of that reproductive and sexual information away from us, we had no clue. Anyways, Horny was sold or traded to another person for another doe, who we promptly named “black devil”, she also had horns, and yes, she was black. The ‘kids’ (Stephens children) always did the animal chores in those days, which usually consisted of tying up the goats in fresh brushy areas so that they wouldn’t run around loose on the property and jump on cars as they were bound to do if they were loose. Once in awhile, my dad would go out to check on the animals to see if we were doing well and taking the right kind of care of them. I remember one particular evening, we were about to leave for the Passion play and my dad decided that we didn’t know what we were doing with the goats so he moved them from where we had tied them and unfortunately tied them on the side of a steep-ish hill. I knew it wasn’t a good idea and since I was the one who really knew the goats I was upset because they tangle around the trees so easily. Well, that night when we got home, Josué and I had to go out to put the goats away and unfortunately, Shneehopli had tangled herself around the tree and since it was a steep hill she had lost her footing and never regained it. She had hung herself. I was so upset and went to tell my dad. He said that Josué and I had to go and bury her right away. We had an animal cemetery of sorts near the old barn so we got a shovel and proceeded to try to dig a hole, at night, that was large enough for this huge goat. We dug and hit rocks but decided that we thought the hole was large enough to accommodate this bloated goat carcass. So we dragged her over and lo and behold she didn’t really fit as well as we’d hoped. We put her down in there with her four legs sticking up and put the dirt over her. Because of the rigor mortis and the depth of the hole, all 4 of her legs remained sticking up in the air out of the hole! So we put 4 large-ish rocks on each leg to try and keep them flat on the ground and then we went to bed. My dad never checked to see how we did and the next day when we went outside, we noticed that the rigor mortis was stronger that the rocks. Two of the rocks had fallen off and there were two goat legs sticking up out of the dirt. I don’t mean like an inch or two, I’m talking a good 7-10 inches, hooves and all. We piled many rocks on there and a few days later the rocks had been pushed away and the legs gnawed on by a wild animal. After that we put more rocks on there so the poor goat could rest in peace. So Black Devil became the new goat on the premises and that is how I remember that story.
