Hannah Belle Gets Her Groove Back

Who doesn't want love?

For almost a year now, since the last breeding season, my daughter Hannah Belle, a former world class goat high jumper, has been pretty much strictly earthbound. Oh sure, now and then she would jump up on a cable spool. Or she'd jump up in the old apple tree. Normal type jumps, two or three or three and a half feet high.

She could hardly even be bothered to jump out of the big-girl stall, which has no upper doors, unless there was a grain party or something on the other side. She didn't jump the four foot fence, or the five foot fence, the way she used to. She didn't move magically from pasture to pasture, at will.

Now that she is almost three years old and a tad zaftig, we all thought she probably couldn't jump seriously any more. Not that she just didn't feel like it.

Well, we were wrong. Hannah Belle has come back into heat, and like Popeye with the spinach, she has her superpowers back. She jumped the four foot wall, trying to get to visit her boyfriend. So the farmer put another rail up above, at a little over five feet. It took some figuring, and some calculating - she backs up and steps off the distance, like those field goal kickers you see on tv, then does a couple of practice runs, then makes the jump - but that was no problem either.

From there she squeezes under the upper pasture gate, then goes down and jumps the lower pasture fence, then squeezes through the marsh-side fence at the bottom of the lower pasture (filled with holes courtesy of Willen the bad pony), squeezes back under the fence on the other side, and sashays up to the buck pen, where she parades nonstop in front of the bucks, driving them a little further, if that is possible at this time of year, insane.

Anyway, if you would like to reach Hannah Belle for the next couple of days this is her address:

Hannah Belle Lecter
inside the Logan Horse Trailer
c/o Herron Hill Dairy Goats
Home, Washington