It was a difficult delivery but Alice and the twins are doing just fine now, thank you

EDITOR’S NOTE — Dan and Jody Spark write for The Armchair Mayor News each Monday about life on a small acreage.

COLUMN — Having been in the delivery room for the births of my four children — and having seen and heard everything — I have developed a sense of calmness when a baby’s world emerges for the first time.

A goat giving birth, on the other hand? Not so calm.

The first problem facing us during the labour of our doe, Alice, was the peculiar nature of Alice. She is a nutcase. She screams as if she’s strapped to some sort of medieval torture device, contorts her body like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat in a bid to wriggle her head under our “secure” goat fence to lick at stray grain, and is a pest to her pen mate.

One morning I walked out the front door of our house to find Alice on the roof of my shop, one hoof on each side of the roof’s peak, screaming her torture scream in acknowledgement of my presence. She was confused. So was I.

Evidently, she escaped from her pen and, instead of heading for greener pastures, decided to test her climbing skills by scaling a pile of lumber stacked beside the shop. Amazingly, she made it up the precarious load of wood and made her ascent to the roof of the shop. One problem: she couldn’t get down.

Through the enticement of a bucket of grain, I lured the skittish doe to the wood pile, grabbed all four of her legs, held her tight to my chest, and made it down the lumber pile . . . despite her thrashing back and forth like a freshly-hooked trout.

Yes, it was from these genes that we were hoping to add to our herd at our hobby farm.

The first glimpse of Alice’s expanded gene pool came at night in the comfort of our barn. It was early April, dark and would otherwise have been a tranquil evening if not for the screams of Alice. After hearing my fair share of shrieks from hospital maternity wards, I was willing to give Alice a break this time.

We found her laying down with a bulge coming from down below. Was it a hoof? A nose? It was difficult to tell with all the slime.

With my experience in such situations coming into play, or at least my experience of watching such experiences on TV, I ordered my wife to get a towel and a bucket of hot water.

“Why we do we need that?” she asked.

“Um, uh, I don’t know,” were the only words I could stammer out. There was no time to argue and it was a fight I couldn’t win, so I dove in as a delivery room doctor. After many pushes, screams and unidentifiable body parts poking out, I was able to help ease out a baby goat. A boy. His sister soon came sliding out and my wife and I stood admiring our cute but wet and shivering kids.

So that was that. A job well done. Time to wash up and go to bed, right? Um, no.

Suddenly, worries of Alice allowing her kids to nurse crept in. Would she accept them? She hasn’t licked them yet. Aren’t goats supposed to lick their young when they’re born? What’s wrong with the hoof of the male kid? It looks like he’s having trouble with it.

So, instead of sleeping in my bed, I “slept” in the barn to keep an eye on the babies. Like a worried father, I made sure Alice allowed her kids to nurse and coaxed mom and new babies to snuggle together on a fresh bed of pine shavings. It was a long, long night.

Nature, like it has a habit of doing, took its course and everything turned out well. And instead of one nutcase, we suddenly had three.

Dan and Jody Spark are in their fourth year of living their back-to-the-land dream on their small acreage at McLure and they are having the time of their life.