Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga

by Todd Alexander

  Two hours later, Billy was finally coaxed onto the trailer and he left our farm for good. I felt empty and avoided their quiet and abandoned pens for several days.

  ‘Do you want me to call the pig farmer and ask how they’re doing?’ Jeff asked.

  ‘No, I don’t want to know,’ I said morosely.

  If the boys were too aggressive or unable to perform, they would have been killed by now.

  I never did hear about Rodney, the once famous Rivers catalogue model, but a few months after they were taken, Pete sent us a photo of Billy’s piglets and I knew then we’d done what was best for the boys. I suppose what made it a little bit bearable saying goodbye was knowing that I still had Winston and Wesley.

  I Shall Name You Winston

  There’s a small hobby farm at the end of our road that raises sheep and cows and has a resident emu we named Eddie. One day, as we drove past, we saw a goat – a brown-faced, mischievous-looking goat – poke its head out through the fence.

  ‘Oh look, they’ve got a goat!’ I pointed out to Jeff.

  ‘Cute,’ he said, and continued driving us home.

  It was December 2016 and Lucy and Charlie were once again staying with us. I got up early the following day, which was already hot, and left them asleep while I went for a run. Jeff was up in the grapevines and the children knew they could call him using my phone if they needed anything.

  It’s a three-kilometre run to the end of the road and I got there happy to have avoided the swooping magpie (who ignores Jeff every spring and summer but likes to scare the shit out of me, an Aussie kid with a long history of ornithophobia), and on the hobby farm’s side of the road I again saw the brown-faced goat. He bleated anxiously at me in an indecipherable way but of course I couldn’t help myself and walked over to give him a scratch on his head.

  ‘Hey there, fella,’ I said, ‘Welcome to the neighbourhood. Aren’t you lovely?’ It was the first time I’d ever had any interaction with a goat.

  Knowing Lucy and Charlie were still alone in the villa, I patted him again then got on with my run, but when my back was turned he’d burst through the barbed wire fence and was now approaching me. All of a sudden those horns of his became a little more threatening and I feared a strike from behind.

  ‘You don’t need to butt me, you know Mr Goaty, I’m very friendly,’ I urged him against his own nature.

  I scratched him to show just how friendly I was and then ran off as fast as my little legs could carry me and I’ll be damned if the bloody goat didn’t follow, step for step. I thought it best to try to outrun him but after about a kilometre his legs started giving way and I worried that he was going to fall and hurt himself. I stopped running and, seeing how tired he was, turned around to walk him back to his farm.

  He bleated at me a few times on the slow walk back, as if to thank me for not making him run any further. Back at the farm I walked up to the fence, spread the wires apart and gave his rump an almighty shove – and then I bolted! And so did the goat, straight back through the fence to chase after me, determined not to let me out of his sight. To the goat, it seemed we were playing one big adventurous game. The kids were still alone and the goat was in danger of hurting himself against the fence if I persisted with these shenanigans.

  ‘Okay, goat,’ I surrendered. ‘Let’s see just how stubborn you are. It’s another three kilometres from here . . .’

  The goat stayed at my side, fell behind, caught up again, and repeated this pattern several times. He was getting tired so I encouraged him to continue, stopping to let him drink from rain puddles and giving him encouraging pats and scratches.

  Almost there, getting closer now, come on you can do it . . . Winston.

  ‘Winston.’ I said the name aloud. ‘Your name is Winston.’ And of course giving him a name meant only one thing: I was instantly, irrevocably attached.

  We got to our property’s gate and I told Winston we just had to get up the driveway then I would be able to give him some water and food. Jeff had finished spraying the vines and was driving the tractor back to the shed. He looked at me walking down the road towards the house and then detected my four-legged friend. I shrugged, hands held out wide, to show him this wasn’t exactly part of my morning’s plan.

  ‘Toddy, what have you done?’ he asked as we approached.

  ‘Jeff, meet Winston.’ I told him the story and he went to wake the kids to meet my new friend.

  Winston would not let me out of his sight. Tired after his long walk, he slept on the deck of the villa and let me lie against him like a pillow. When I left him even for a minute, he bleated madly and jumped up against the glass doors, those hooves of his clacking dangerously, making me worried he would smash right through. Having a goat for a pet was not one of the harebrained schemes we’d considered for Block Eight so Jeff called around the neighbours to see who he belonged to . . . but no one knew whose he was, not even the owner of the hobby farm where I first saw the goat at the end of the road. Winston would have to stay with us for the time being, until we could find his true owner. Yeah right, who was I ‘kidding’? I was already head over heels in love.

  Later that morning we locked Winston inside the chicken pen. As we drove off, Winston called out to me not to leave him, climbing up against the wire of the pen to watch us go. It was about a one-hour round trip to the Farmer’s Warehouse where we told the girl behind the counter about our new pet. Coincidentally she’d raised goats and told us all about them, what they liked and didn’t like, what food to buy, a wormer to give him and that goats preferred human company over all other animals, hence Winston’s determination to follow me all the way home. Two hours later, we’d built Winston his new home so at least now I could go about my day without having a goat tap against the windows wherever I was.

  He soon was starring in a quirky little movie the kids made called Careful What You Wish For where Charlie (who has a habit of eating with his mouth open) turns into Winston, who does the same.

  I made sure Winston still got quality time with me: each afternoon we went for long walks around the property. Winston usually stayed by my side or went off to graze on fresh grass nearby. It really pained me to take him for walks but have to leave the pigs behind so I avoided their gazes as best I could and sometimes told Rodney a little white lie: that I was taking Winston to the vet every day, so he shouldn’t be jealous.

  Winston is a funny little character – very cheeky with a naughty look in his eyes, barrel chested and with a saunter to his gait. He is very vocal, too, and always tells us when he is hungry, or happy to see us, or annoyed by something we do. It’s usually Jeff who annoys him, never me. Winston also loves to play, particularly with Jeff, who he often sneaks up on and butts, earning him the surname Buttworth-Jones. He did the same to Cheryl and ever since I’ve proclaimed him an uncanny judge of character. I worried he was lonely during the day with only the pigs to talk to through the adjoining fence, so early in the New Year Jeff and I drove about an hour to collect him a baby brother.

  This little goat was the softest, cutest thing I had ever seen. He was scared to be leaving home so all the way in the car I held onto his hoof and stroked him gently. He was all white, had one ear up and one ear down and tiny little horns protruding from the top of his head.

  ‘What shall we call him?’ Jeff asked as he drove.

  We went through a lot of names but none of them felt quite right for this all-white little bundle of fur. Eventually we landed on Wesley . . . Wesley Chesney.

  The boys liked each other straightaway, though being bigger it was clear at the outset that Winston was the boss and whenever food comes into the equation Wesley is quickly shunted out of the way. Wesley joined Winston and me on our daily walk and quickly bonded, in large part thanks to the bottle of milk Wesley got handfed twice a day.

  The simple fact of it was that those times in the pen with the goats were among the happiest of my day. I loved watching their personalities emerge and the way they use their h
ooves to urge me to continue scratching them. Wesley is always the more vocal goat, bleating out at me from a distance when he wants food or attention (i.e. all the time). His ‘voice’ is higher pitched than Winston’s, whose own bleat is distinctively tainted with attitude. Winston developed a penchant for butting any human other than me, particularly little children, and then one day he took it upon himself to run away from me.

  Unusually, the guests in the house had left the front door open. Since all the blinds were drawn, I thought they must have been taking an afternoon nap after a long day of wine tasting. Sure enough, Winston (with Wesley in tow) made a direct line for the house and then bleated with delight when he saw the front door was open. I bolted after them as fast as I could but it was too late, they had disappeared inside. I got to the door to find them both standing on the couch, hoof prints embedding in the leather.

  ‘Winston! Come here!’ I whispered harshly. To which he bleated very loudly.

  I imagined the guests waking from their rest and asking each other: Did you hear a bleat coming from the lounge room? No . . . surely you imagined it? At least it was my hope that no one in their right mind would believe two goats had made themselves at home on the couch. Eventually I coaxed the naughty twosome outside, but ever since that day I have walked Winston in a harness, all the better to grab a hold of him when he gets the notion to cause havoc . . . which happens often enough.

  Having learned my lesson with Rodney and Billy, and seeing that Winston had been neutered, we had a band placed around Wesley’s testicles to reduce the chances of him showing dominant or aggressive behaviour. It was the least painful way of removing them and after the initial hour of discomfort, Wesley couldn’t have cared less.

  One morning I made Jeff his favourite breakfast of beans on toast. You can take the boy out of England . . .

  ‘You’re being very nice to me today. What did you do wrong?’

  ‘Oh don’t be like that, I don’t always have something to apologise for, I just thought it would be nice to treat you to something special.’

  He sat down happily waiting for me to serve his meal. A plate of steaming hot beans and two overly dark toasted muffins. I even made him a cup of tea and, after he sat and began eating, I placed down a little side plate with the morning’s real treat.

  ‘I got you something extra special for breakfast,’ I said.

  He looked at it for a moment in confusion and then it dawned on him.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’

  ‘Sure is! Must have popped off this morning!’ Wesley’s ball bag was tiny and shrivelled.

  ‘You are truly disgusting,’ he said as we got the giggles.

  *

  In March 2017, just as Wesley was giving up the bottle, Jeff came inside the guesthouse to interrupt my cleaning.

  ‘You’d better come outside,’ he said forlornly. ‘And you’re not going to like it.’

  Winston’s original owners had tracked him down. He was raised by a sixteen-year-old boy whose parents had got divorced, and in the separation of lives Winston had been taken to graze on a property five doors down from us, where the boy’s aunt cleaned a house rented out to tourists. The boy’s dad had run into one of our neighbours and had asked if they’d spotted the missing goat.

  ‘You’ll find the goat at the end of the road,’ they were told, along with directions to our home.

  ‘He cried for weeks when Stampy went missing,’ the father explained before telling the story. ‘The plan was to visit him as often as we could and bring him a horse for company but within two days of dropping him off he’d disappeared. We thought someone had stolen him.’

  I took them up to the pen and expected a reunion of YouTube-worthy emotion but if Winston (what kind of name is Stampy!) recognised the boy he showed no signs.

  ‘I’ve become quite attached to your goat,’ I tried feebly, ‘Are you sure you want to take him back? I could pay you for him.’

  ‘No, I miss him too much,’ the boy said shyly. ‘I raised him from a baby and I was so sad to lose him. You can come down the road and visit him any time you like . . .’

  ‘I run along that road almost every day,’ I explained to the father. ‘What do you want me to do if he follows me again?’

  ‘If that happens, we’ll have to sort something out.’

  Winston was taken from the pen and tied to the back of the truck and, as they drove off, Wesley bleated out great big sobs of anguish. I knew exactly how he was feeling. For all the bullying he’d received he sure did sound sad to see his big brother taken away from him.

  I walked into the house dismayed, at a loss. Jeff followed behind.

  ‘I don’t think I can do this any more,’ I said. ‘First the pigs and now Winston, it’s breaking my fucking heart. I feel like I’ve lost my best friend.’ Then I burst into tears.

  Jeff threw his arms around me. ‘It’s okay, Toddy. We’ll go and visit him as often as you like; we’ll get another goat as soon as we can.’

  But there was just something about Winston I had grown very fond of. He wasn’t just another goat; he’d chosen me to follow home and from that day on we’d been the best of friends. Other people looked at those horns of his and felt threatened, I just saw a loving, lovable young chap who wanted to play and be by my side. I’d never once felt in danger in his company.

  ‘I need to man up! It’s a goat for Christ’s sake!’ I tried to lighten the situation but dammit, I was miserable. ‘That kid is just sixteen, it’s his goat, he was never really mine . . .’

  Wesley was inconsolable so I let him out of the pen and took him into the forbidden area of the vegie patch. Together we weeded the garden beds and he got treats of stolen carrots and spinach. We worked together for two hours or so, keeping each other company, telling each other how much we missed Winston, even his bossiness and the head butts.

  ‘What about the way he ran!’ I said to Wesley with a chuckle, like we were reminiscing at a mate’s funeral. ‘And the way he ate bananas!’ I wiped tears from my eyes and knew that Wesley comprehended exactly what I was saying. ‘Maybe we will go and get you another brother? Or a girlfriend maybe? Would you like that?’ And Wesley stopped chewing spinach for a moment and looked off into the distance, as he always does when he has a mouthful of something delicious, and that day it was as if he was imagining whether life without Winston would ever be the same.

  Just as Wesley and I were getting ready to hang up our gardening gloves for the day, my phone rang.

  ‘Hey mate, this is Stampy’s dad.’ His name isn’t fucking Stampy! I could have screamed, but did not. ‘My boy has got something to say to you.’

  My heart sank, my stomach swirled.

  ‘Um . . .’ the kid was so nervous it could only mean one thing. ‘I . . . I was just thinking . . . he’s got such a nice home there with you and . . . you walk him every day and . . . did you say you would be happy to offer me some money for him?’

  Bingo! ‘Yes,’ I said calmly, though internally I was doing cartwheels.

  ‘How . . . how much . . . money were you thinking?’

  ‘Well you tell me what you think.’

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘On Gumtree you can get a goat for anywhere between eighty and a hundred and twenty dollars.’

  ‘How about one hundred then?’

  ‘Okay. It’s a deal.’

  ‘Thanks. We’ll bring him back after Dad’s finished work down here.’

  I sent Jeff off to get the cash, deciding that a hundred and fifty dollars would be my reward to the boy for not being greedy when I was clearly more attached to the goat than he.

  ‘How high would you have gone?’ Jeff asked before he left to get the cash.

  ‘Five hundred without blinking,’ I said, ‘and up to a thousand at a push. Now go get my mate back.’

  By late afternoon we still hadn’t heard from the boy or his dad so on the way back from the bank I asked Jeff to drop off the cash and see what the situatio
n was. He called from the farm down the road.

  ‘We’re coming home!’

  I waited excitedly for them to turn up the driveway and then I saw that familiar silhouette of Winston, sitting on the front seat of the Barina no less, his head and horns poking out the passenger side window. When he saw me he bleated excitedly.

  ‘You know, he hasn’t made a single sound all the way home and then he saw you and he called out! He knows this is his home, he knows who you are.’

  Well of course he did. We are such good friends, in fact, Winston and I were featured in a photographic book, Outback Mates.

  Massaging a Chicken in a Warm Water Bath

  Winston and his sidekick Wesley were not the only animals on the property that liked to investigate what the guests were up to. We’ve had many chickens over the years; lost a lot to foxes, heat stroke and being eggbound, but a few emerged with incredibly strong personalities – and some were complete stickybeaks.

  One memorable character was Lizzie Birdsworth, the chicken with a limp. When left in the pen with all the other hens, it was no secret she was the bottom of the pecking order because of her very visible affliction. Most chooks will flee from a pecking attack but Lizzie never could, so when one of the chickens started in on her, she just lay prostrate until it was over. It was truly horrible to see and no amount of shooing away the chickens could deter them from their nastiness. Once the other chickens saw her vulnerability they too would pounce and it wasn’t uncommon to see three or four chickens pecking away at her. Things turned nasty one day and the pecking attack had been so savage we found her with a large bloody hole in the top of her head. The only thing to do was to remove her from the pen so Jeff set her up a nice wooden house on the deck of the villa we were building at the time, Water View.

  One day as I was building outside (yes me, building without Jeff!), a large goanna came to sniff Lizzie the chook out. I think he had his eye on her for lunch. I managed to scare him off by throwing a few pieces of structural pine near him but about an hour later he approached again. This time, Leroy was outside and watching with keen interest as the lizard came towards us and I wondered if he remembered the time he’d watched one eat a rabbit. This day as the goanna got closer, however, Leroy looked determined not to run away.