While she cleans, she also gives birth to a second baby. She is so focused on the first, she barely seems to notice. Again, I wipe a little face and move the baby next to its brother. Gruff seems to know what gender they are, though I don’t know how. Strumpet starts pushing again. I look over at Gruff, who is leaning next to the barn door, a smile on his face that broadens to a grin as he sees my astonishment.
“Another one?”
“Another one,” he says. “I’ll bet this one’s a girl.”
This one is smaller than the others. Strumpet barely needs to push and she comes sailing out elegantly, feet first, head demurely tucked. She is white with a little dark toupee, the exact opposite of her brothers. I cannot believe how sweet she looks already as I clean her little face and put her with her huskier, darker brothers.
Strumpet is hard at work now. She painstakingly clears away all the amniotic material, welcoming them to the world with little maternal sounds and eager laps of her tongue.
The baby goats take this treatment with a particular gooey stoicism. If they are surprised to have been born, they do not seem it. Their eyes are open, and they seem to have emerged with their opinions fully formed. When one gets too little attention, it utters a little bleat and Strumpet immediately transfers her licking attention to the noisiest one.
“You can touch them,” Gruff says. “She trusts you. See what she has had.”
It’s not easy to work it out at first. I feel a little intrusive looking where I am looking, but I soon discover that Gruff was right. She has had two boys and one girl, all robust and up on their feet within fifteen minutes of birth.
“She’s only got two udders,” I say. “How is she supposed to feed three goats?”
“She has two teats and one udder,” he says. “And you’ll need to keep an eye on them to ensure that they’re all getting what they need. I’ll show you how to tell. Don’t worry. They’re all good strong babies.”
Right now, I am watching these good strong babies stumble about underneath Strumpet, banging their heads on various parts of her undersides and attempting to suckle from literally any bit of her body that is not actually the teat. It’s as if they’ve all been born with fifty percent of an instruction manual on how to feed, a sort of instructions-unclear conundrum. Occasionally, one of them will nudge the udder, but then immediately dismiss it as an option. Watching this process is an exercise in amusement and frustration.
“What are they doing? Why…”
“You can help them out,” Gruff says. “Gently.”
I do help, gently, which only seems to annoy the baby goat who was very confidently suckling on Strumpet’s elbow. The little girl doe lets me help her first, and so she is the first to feed, followed eventually by her brothers. Within an hour or so of her birth process beginning, Strumpet’s babies are cleaned, fed, and curled up with each other in which I can only describe as a very smug looking pile of baby goats.
“They’re amazing,” I declare, getting up and going over to Gruff, thoroughly convinced that these are absolutely the best goats to ever have been born on any planet anywhere. “Look how perfect they are.”
I am covered in straw, goo, and unmentionable material, but that doesn’t matter. Gruff hugs me close. “Congratulations,” he says. “Your first kidding is over, and it was a success.”
Strumpet looks so happy. More than happy. She looks content, and settled. She looks like a goat who is exactly where she is supposed to be. I feel her contentment infecting me, getting into my bloodstream, making me feel a hormonally kind of settled.
I used to think of myself as separate from everything around me. I was a Jem, and a Jem did not need anybody. A Jem could go anywhere and it didn’t matter, because Jem was a self-contained unit. I don’t feel like that anymore. I feel like I’m a Jem-shaped vessel. The world flows in and out of me, and the people and the creatures I love don’t just influence my mood, they become part of me in ebbs and flows.
“They're perfect,” I breathe, looking up at Gruff with shining eyes. “This is perfect.”
“Yes,” Gruff agrees with much the same expression. “Yes, it is.”
“They’re mine,” I say. “And I’m yours.”
Gruff’s grin broadens. “I have waited a very long time to hear you say that,” he says, holding me close. “Though it has been true from the moment I first laid eyes on you.”
“Oh, that long?” I smile up at him, and receive his rough, fanged kiss.
“That long,” he says. “An eternity.”
* * *