This close, I could see a worn leather collar with a small brass tag. The tag was too far for me to read but the collar meant somebody owned this animal, which meant somebody was probably looking for it.
I held out my hand.
The goat bolted. It didn’t go back the way it had come. It headed straight toward the meadow.Mymeadow where I'd spent four of the last five afternoons sketching. The goat was running into my workspace, and I had a pencil behind my ear and wasn’t even wearing a bra and had no good reason to do what I did next.
I ran after it.
I was halfway across the meadow when I heard the truck. Treyton's truck. It was coming up the road slower than usual, the way someone might if they were looking for something. He pulled to the shoulder where my SUV was still parked, killed the engine, and got out.
I waved at him from forty feet out, in the meadow, with the goat now standing in a patch of long grass and looking at me like I owed it an explanation.
Treyton walked across the meadow and stopped next to me. “That's one of Gibson's.”
“Gibson who?”
“Doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that Gibson has too many goats.”
The goat didn’t seem to agree. It lifted its head and let out a cross between abaaand ablah.
“His sister runs a soap business,” Treyton said. “Started with three goats. I don’t even know how many she has now, but it’s got to be at least two dozen.”
“That's a lot of goats.”
“Sure is.” He took two steps toward the goat. The goat seemed to weigh its options before bolting again. It ran twenty feet, stopped, looked back.
Treyton shrugged.
“It’s acting like it wants to be caught,” I said.
“It wants to be carried. This one thinks it’s a princess and thinks it deserves the royal treatment. I’m going to have to carry her back.”
“You can't —”
“I can.”
“Treyton, she's not —”
“Soleil. Just watch.”
He walked toward the goat. The goat stood perfectly still, watching him the way a cat tracks a person it has decided to allow into a room. Treyton bent down. He got one arm under her belly. Then he stood up with her, and the goat went limp.
Completely, unambiguously, supremely limp. Like she had been waiting all morning for someone to do this. Her head rested on his shoulder. Her front legs hung against his chest. Her back legs hung against his hip. Treyton looked at me, deadpan, with a goat draped across his torso like a shawl.
“She rides,” he said.
“Apparently she rides.”
“This is Penny. She's the worst one. Gibson loves her.”
“Hi, Penny.”
Penny did not respond to her name. Penny was, by all available evidence, asleep.
Treyton started walking back across the meadow with me following behind him. We passed my SUV, then his truck. He kept walking.
“You're walking her back?”
“It's only a quarter mile. She never goes very far, and she’s not that heavy.” He looked at me sideways. His mouth did something at the corner that, on a man who'd ever heard of smiling, might have been a smile.
