My weekend was full of goats and turkeys.

Friday, Markstay:

I don’t know what I have done to anger the Fates so, but they have conspired lately to turn my life  into a series of Comedies of the most absurd kind.  Take for example today. 

I got in from helping a friend move and it was early afternoon.  A perfect time for me to lay out the platform for the woodstove downstairs.  I went down into the basement and began to unpack my tools when I heard the dogs barking, which is something they don’t normally do, unless there is an animal around or, rarely, there is somebody in the driveway they don’t recognise.  I could see no one, so I assumed it was an animal – and by the way they were barking, a big one.  I ran upstairs and out towards the dogyard, just in case there was a dog loose because, judging from their increasingly excited sound, something was still going on. 

A tuft of six-foot tall grass blocks  a straight-line view of the dogyard from our house, but once I rounded the corner, I saw the cause for the excitement.  It was our male goat, Ty.  He was standing a few feet from the gate of the dogyard, staring in, much like that simple kid we all knew did when he saw something just beyond his comprehension.

I don’t know what goes through a goat’s head in the course of a day, but it can’t be much.  Here stood our Ty, looking ponderously in at twenty-two dogs intent on at least getting a bit closer.  Within tasting range closer.

I clapped my hands and said “TY!” in a loud voice.  He seemed startled at hearing me and turned to run away, so I chased him and clapped my hands the whole way hoping to impress upon him that with 38 remaining acres to roam, the dogyard should be avoided.  He bucked as he ran and bleated his little bleat – a sound not unlike a soft, maniacal laugh that ends in a snort.

Back in the house I went.

Not five minutes later, the dogs start barking again.  And I go outside again.  And there is Ty.   Staring in at the dogs. 

I could let the dogs bark all day if they wanted to.  I don’t really care – I barely hear them.  But our neighbours do.  As do the people across the river from us and I expect that they would care, which means that I kind of have to care.   So, off I go again to scare away Ty.

“But wait,” I hear you ask, “don’t you have two fenced in pastures with a barn in each for the goats?”  To which I respond:

“Why, yes, dearest reader, I do.  But that G-D goat can climb the fence faster than I can fix it.”  It’s here that I’d like to point out that I haven’t been outsmarted by a goat, just out manoevered: afterall, he’s got all day to devote to planning his escape.  Me, I have other things to concern myself with.  In all of this, I don’t bother trying to re-pen Ty.  He’ll just escape again.

I lack the fenceposts to stiffen the fence up: Ty escapes by putting his front legs on the fence and standing on it so it sags.  Then he just sort of lumbers over it.  More fence posts would be helpful as would the time to install them.  Another answer is an electric fence – which we have most of the parts for – but again, I lack the time to put one up.  But, if I did have the time, I’d rig it up special for Ty: I’d wire it into the 60-amp service we have at the house.  Jenn and I would be eating fried goat for dinner.  Next year we plan on having the lower field enclosed by electric fence.  That shouldn’t take long; it’s only a few acres in size.

Me chasing that stupid goat around the yard continued until it came time to feed everybody, which is to say I spent the better part of my afternoon running after a goat, clapping my hands, looking every bit the poster guy for institutionalization.

Tomorrow is the Great Turkey Roundup, so I hope to have nothing to write about that.

 

Saturday, Markstay:

You’re not going to believe it.  I didn’t believe it and I was there.  Nothing happened with the Great Turkey Roundup.  Not a problem anywhere: in fact, we we’re even ten minutes early leaving the house.  I know – amazing.

We caught and loaded our birds and planned to leave the house at 09h00.  We were smart and locked the turkeys in their coop the night before so it was just a matter of grabbing and putting in the truck.  We had been warned that the cut-off for processing was twenty five pounds and as we loaded the birds it seemed more and more like we’d be having to do the work ourselves.  Some of those birds were heavy.  And flappy, which didn’t make the task any easier.

At first, I would just grab the bird around it’s wings and body and carry it to the truck, but that featherless, snakey neck of theirs always seemed to position their heads right at my eye level and I don’t trust those peck-y buggers.  They’d peck at the rivits in my pants or the buttons on a jacket and seriously, with a brain little more than a nerve with a knot tied in it, what’s preventing them from having a go at my eyeball?  I started to carry them by their legs, upside down.  This reduced the flapping considerably, too.

There’s a pretty picture.  The turkeys finally loaded into the back of the truck.

Next was a dozen or so of Jenn’s laying hens.  She’s sold all but four now and those she’s keeping for us to have eggs through the winter.  We were going right by the buyer’s house that morning so Jenn said she’d drop them off.  After grabbing and wrestling with turkeys, these wee little hens were almost like chicks.

Jenn’s chickens awaiting transport in a dog crate to their new home.

It had been raining all morning – hooray for the Ontario autumn – and as we left the house with a full coffee, dressed kid, load of turkeys and chickens and ten minutes to spare, the rain stopped and the clouds parted.  We drove in a rare beam of sunshine. 

“Something is bound to go wrong.  I hope those turkeys pass.” Jenn said, referring to their weight.

“Yeah.  We’re pretty organised today. ” I commented, continuing with “I might as well drive us into the ditch now.”

We offloaded the chickens to their new owner and headed to the turkey killin’ place.

A great line up of vehicles awaited us when we got there.  Most of them had a turkey head or two peeking out of some sort of makeshift enclosure.  There was activity at the door so Jenn went to see how backed up the place was and to let them know we were here.  As it turned out, they were an hour behind schedule because of the size of some people’s birds.  They were just not able to process them fast enough to maintain their times.

 

The guy in the white is the meat inspector and he’s headed to our truck to check out our turkeys.  The door where we unload the birds is open and processing takes place to the right of the door.

The three of us watched as a truck unloaded it’s cargo.  Then another, then another.  It’s pretty much the same for each bird: grab it by the feet, hold it upside down so it stops flapping and hang it by it’s feet on a wire frame.  Within the span of ten seconds, the bird is dragged over an electrocuted sponge and is killed.  Very quick, very efficient and judging by the speed with which it happens, painless.

The truck before us pulled in and parked his acre-sized trailer by the door.  He, his wife and their son jumped out and started unloading with all the precision of a military drill squad.  At one point, a flapping wing took the lady in the face, knocking her glasses so they were half-cocked on her nose and cheek.  She didn’t miss a beat: grab turkey, pass; grab turkey, pass; grab turkey, pass (nudge glasses back with shoulder); grab turkey, pass.  Added to the smoothness of their unloading was the fact that their turkeys all looked to be within a half pound of each other.  “They’ve done this before.” Jenn said to me; and it was good that they had done this before because they had sixty five birds in all to unload.  Grab turkey, pass.

Now came the moment we had been dreading: the woman in charge of the kill floor came out to organise the next batch; that being us.  We opened our truck and she laughed as she saw our birds.  Not good.  “I’ll take them this time, but next year, nothing over twenty five pounds.”  Thank God.  Grab turkey, pass.

With our birds sent to their final destination, we drove away happy to have raised them and glad to have them all accepted.  We’d be back for 15h30 to pick them up and deliver them to Jenn’s customers.

This is one of the larger turkeys that we delivered.  It was a “twenty-five pound plus” bird since Jenn’s scale only went to twenty five.  We weighed ours on the bathroom scale when we got home.  It was 33 lbs.