Black Mountain
Lady
Jay
Dyck
Diary of a Goatherder 7 June 1981

Writing poses a problem. Sitting down again this morning in Sambo's across the street
from the station, having my morning coffee. Writing. What was I writing yesterday
morning? I vaguely recall it. Should I reread a portion, to catch the drift, or just press on?
Goat herding. Here is what I learned from the goats. Goats butt a lot. They never butted
me, except for a few early warning jabs from the bigger girls, but they were merciless on
one another.
It was always the bigger goat butting the smaller. The smaller one never butted back.
Take Amy for instance. Amy was a beautiful doe of three colors, black, white and reddish
brown. Gentle and affectionate, she was a patient, good milker.
She was minding her own business one day, nibbling on some scrub oak. The herd was
spread over the area. It was quiet except for the sounds of munching from eighteen sets of
jaws.
Amy's head was plunged into the green summer leaves. Her ear flicked a fly. Suddenly,
pain in her side, in her rib cage. Her breath is knocked from her body and she is pushed
off her feet. Out of control for a moment, she falls stupidly, terrified, rolling in the dust
with her legs tangled above her, eyes rolling, bleating.
Towering over her, mean and brown, stands Lucy. Lucy's horns glint in the sun. She
lowers them menacingly.
Amy has no horns. She scrambles to her feet and hurries away to the edge of the herd,
before Lucy can butt her again.
Amy is a strong young goat, a mother, tough. Horns make a difference. She shrugs off
the tingle in her side.
At the edge of the herd she sees Shauna. Shauna is still a kid, born in early spring, and
this is mid-summer. But she's sizable, half-grown. Her chubby sides are rounded with
food. She nibbles lilac, moving steadily away from the herd. She doesn't notice Amy. The
food is good.
Bam! Amy butts her. Shauna stumbles to her knees, then flashes out of reach. Amy wags
her tail and takes her place at the lilac bush.
Shauna hopped up onto a ledge of rock that angled down by the edge of the lilac bush.
Picking her way along the narrow path, she moved up to the top of the cliff and over the
knoll.
Shauna didn’t have a bell. So she dropped into silence as she left the tinkling murmur of
the herd behind. She skipped into a little green glade, shaded by a big oak. Grass still
green and high. Lush.
Kasha was there, her little head lost in the tallness. She was nosing out the delicate herbs
that hide at the base of the grass stems. Kisa and Olga were in the glade too, but over at
the side. Shauna didn’t notice them, but Kasha, the smallest of all the kids, was right in
her way. Shauna didn’t hesitate. Lowering her head, she charged. She brought her hard
little skull up under Kasha’s belly and flipped her over, end for end.
She landed in a heap, sprawling. Shauna hit her again before she regained her feet. She
gave out with a cry. She stood up dazed, moved a couple of steps, stopped and shook her
head. Shauna started to butt her again, but Kasha scampered away, around the oak.
Quickly she forgot her pain. There, ahead of her, was a delightful tangle of wild sweet
peas, dangling from a trellis of oak branches. She began to eat contentedly, tail wagging.
Meanwhile, in the glade, Kisa and Olga began to feel nervous about the chufty Shauna,
and they edged toward the safe path around the oak as she edged across the tiny meadow
toward them.
The remaining three kids, Crystal, Maya and Ninga, were strung out along the angled
rock ledge by now. Single file they crossed over and followed Shauna into the glade.
Dolly, of the curved horn, came next. She was Amy's mother. Amy fell in behind her,
crowding Torie, her sister, who bounded ahead of her up the rock and over the top.
Meanwhile, Lucy of the wicked horns was totally involved with lilac. Along came Dee
Dee, real name Daisy. Called Dee Dee so as not to be confused with her mother, Mazie,
queen of the herd, Dee Dee was crown princess, and mother of the twin does, Crystal and
Maya. Dee Dee was about the same size as Lucy, maybe a little sleeker and fatter, where
Lucy was course and wiry.
Without warning she lowered her thick horns into Lucy's side.
Lucy snorted and whirled to face Dee Dee, lowered her own angry weapons… the two
goats then went up on their hind legs and came down with a crash, head to head, horn to
horn.
With the noise of the impact, Jody, Katy and Nicki left the flat and followed the herd up
the cliff.
Lucy and Dee Dee came together again with a crack, and Lucy backed up.
Just then Mazie came imperiously through the bushes behind on the trail, flanked by the
two shambling, sun-drowsed bucks, Luke and Jacques, who good naturedly brushed
shoulder to shoulder.
Mazie's horns were half again as long as Dee Dee's and Lucy's, eighteen inch curved
daggers. Her nostrils flared as she stepped up to the battle. Lucy fled instantly, up the cliff.
Dee Dee followed after a moment.
Up ahead, Kasha had been pushed away from the wild sweet peas. With a last strand of
lavender blossoms trailing across her shoulder and disappearing into her mouth, she burst
through the bushes onto an open slope.
Nothing here. Wispy, dry grass and broken rocks, but a dusty trail threaded across the
slope and turned upward into an inviting draw, shadowy and green, a couple hundred
yards away. Kasha started along the trail, followed shortly by Olga and Kisa. By now most
of the herd had spotted the new direction and were heading purposefully toward the draw.
Stretched out in single file, the line was long. Kasha was halfway across before Shauna
overtook her, and, with a skull to the flank, pushed her out of the way. Mazie and the
bucks stepped onto the trail. Old Katy was just ahead of Mazie and quickly drifted off to
the side as Mazie trotted past.
Then, as Mazie slowed down, Luke caught up with her and firmly shouldered her off of
the path as he drew alongside.
Mazie tossed her horns at him, murderous points, yet she didn’t touch him. He eyed her
casually. She flashed her eyes. Luke had no horns, but he outweighed her by seventy
pounds.
I never saw Mazie seriously challenge the bucks. Jacques was as big as Luke, plus he had
curly horns, not pointed like Mazie's, but massive and round. She would spar with them
angrily, but not seriously. Nor did they come down hard on her, for she yielded easily. But
with any other goat she was merciless, yet I never saw her butt Dee Dee, her daughter.
Similarly, Crystal and Maya were safe from Dee Dee. Nicki, also, was the only goat who
could graze unmolested near Lucy, her mother.
Chapter Forty-seven

LEGENDS OF GENOCIDE
How about Chela? She's going to be alright too. She has one or two more kittens to bear, and so she will, in
health and prosperity. Maybe that's just a rash prediction, but we're going to let it slide.
Who knows? Maybe all sorts of things are going to be alright. Maybe this infant tribe will prosper, and grow,
and reach out and mingle with others of the same heart.
Maybe they will keep their secrets. Maybe they will stay hidden forever in the illusions of the society of
mankind. Soft and graceful, the clawless purr-print in the soft sand of a country road, the clean ripple of a
deadly pond, the swish of a feathery eclipse… maybe they will fit the niche.
Maybe all of humanity's problems will be solved, not by the wise, but by the fools. While the best and the
brightest fumble and lurch in the graceless quest for answers, maybe the excess, the too many, the too hungry,
the too filthy, too dangerous, too crowded, too careless, too sick, too ignorant, too unconcerned, the masses who
consume too much, destroy too much, waste too much, contaminate too much, abuse too much… maybe they
will just go away.
Maybe they will just go away, just disappear, one by one by one by one. It could take thousands, or millions of
years. Mankind will maybe be up to its eyeballs in perilous stress, before the toll begins to tilt.
Yet, what a short step it will be to each silver lining. The job, the home, the bite to eat that is there because it
has not gone to another.
Jeff mourns for Jerry, cut down in his prime, but Jeff takes Jerry's good job and perhaps his cute wife as well,
with only serendipity to thank, and the unseen predator that never looked back.
Polly is mourned and missed, but Barbara's children play in the sunshine that would have been the shadows of
Polly's brood, had she lived to bear them. Barbara need look only to luck to answer her puzzle of wonder, and
to the puffs of dust settling on the outlaw's trail.
Perhaps whole nations will settle back in comfort, in a land grown lean and fertile, with legends of genocide to
purple their Hallowe'ens.
  Vikor had seen a movie once which featured the killing in self-defense of a couple of inbred, backwoods
morons by a party of canoeing yuppies. In an early scene, one of the yups had sunk an arrow, a hunting arrow
with three gnarly, razor-sharp blades, deep into the trunk of a southern hardwood. Then, in the movie, he had
come upon his miss (for a miss it had been, and a deer had scampered safely away at the thunk), and, seizing
the shaft in his fist and bracing himself against the tree, he had pulled with might and main, and finally freed
the arrow after long seconds of struggle.
Sure.
At most he would have freed the shaft from the head.
"I mostly use a knife. A dagger," he said. They were curled up together, cross-legged, side by side on the giant
chunk of stone, staring with strange morosity at the civilization that could be seen down at the mouth of the
canyon.
He was talking now, not about how he dug arrows free from tree trunks, but about how he made his kills.
"Ooh, a dagger," she repeated in a dreamy tone. She said it the way another might say, ooh, a Mercedes, or,
ooh, a diamond. "Isn't it dangerous?" she asked.
"Maybe right at the time of the strike," he said. "But that only lasts for a second.
"It might be more dangerous," he went on, "if I were to tackle a victim who was too big, too strong, too fast…
too alert.
"I can see if I were to whip out my blade and attack a healthy man who had both eyes open and on me, and
maybe some martial arts training… or a gun… I can see where that might be dangerous. More dangerous, for
a moment, than a gun, or a bow.
"But I don't do that." He turned his head and looked at her. Just then he remembered another detail of his
youth. He recalled the scorn that Ma had expressed toward the deer hunters. By the time of this meeting, with
industry and housing developments encircling Black Mountain like a siege, legal hunting, at least with guns,
had been banned. One had to go far to the east, beyond 395, which was now Interstate 15, past more city and
into the mountains themselves, before legal shooting areas could be found. Even then, most areas were posted.
But back in the sixties and seventies there was still hunting pressure along all of the unbuilt canyons and
ridges of San Diego County. It was dangerous to be where Diana and little Victor lived during deer season, and
all year there was the steady threat of poachers and plinkers to be alert to, and to avoid.
She hated what had already happened to the herd. Small size, barren does, bucks rare, racks stunted and
deformed.
It wasn't only sorrow at seeing fifty pounds or more of venison that could have been hers, that she and her boy
could have roasted and jerked, that kept her bitter, that made her see red while another poor, tick-bit refugee
was draped over the fenders of a Ford, or tossed into the back of a pickup. It wasn't only the waste that would
tear her heart when in their wanderings they once or twice found a buck, decapitated, meat and skin left to rot
and swell and stink in the sunshine. There were still vultures over the hills in those days, so it really was not a
waste.
But, again, it wasn't just the feeling that her personal larder of live emergency survival food had been raided
by fat shooters for sport that made her despise the hunters. All of these things were horrible to Diana Stream.
They were all tiny drops in the bucket of reasons that she had to rejoice that her wild son was now sharing in
the harvest of the bloated species that trampled her world.
He remembered how they had pissed her off. Watching from cover, Ma and her son had seen the attitudes the
hunters brought with them to the hills and acted out. They weren't only after deer. They came to kill rabbits,
and squirrels, and quail. They came to kill coke bottles left by the side of the road. They came to kill the
roadside signs, for all were equal enemies to these imaginary warriors. They came at night in whooping groups,
shooting cottontails and jackrabbits trapped in the headlights' beams.
They came to kill coyotes and foxes and bobcats and badgers and skunks and weasels and 'possums and
raccoons. They came to kill hawks and eagles and vultures and crows, as well as doves and quail, ducks and
geese, and robins and thrushes and linnets and wrens and gnat-catchers and herons and road-runners and larks
and humming birds.
They came to kill whippoorwills.
Once in a while, they came to kill one another. It was the only time Diana allowed herself some remote
satisfaction over their crumby deeds. She hated them, for it seemed that they hated her friends, all the wildlife
that had shared the hiding places in the chaparral with her and her family, her parents and her son, the already
generations of refugees that had made these valleys home. Every little songbird was an enemy to be sniped.
In their minds, the shooters were often saviors, saving the farmers' stock from the predation of everything
from mountain lions to weasels, saving the farmers' crops from deer, rabbits and rodents down to mice, saving
the farmers' chickens from vermin hawks, saving the farmer's eaves from swallows. All life was enemy to
these city-soldiers. Every snake was a massacre left to putrefy. The very trees and brush and grass conspired to
conceal the quarry, and so were stamped and snapped and burned.
When Diana hunted, she was hunting her friends and neighbors, her fellow inhabitants of the rough land. Not
the humans. That was a step for little Victor's generation. They were scarcely her neighbors, and certainly not
her friends.
But every sparrow knew Diana. She loved them all, as though she were Mother Nature herself. She loved the
brush; she loved the tree-lined streams. She loved the dwellers of hillsides, treetops, burrows and thickets; she
loved them all. She loved the very shape of the land. She loved the plants.
When it came time to kill and to eat, to gather and to hunt, whether it was a mouthful of miner's lettuce or a
gentle and innocent bunny, she did it with the deft concern of a mother plucking ticks from a tiny child. Her
victims walked their own sweet paths to their doom at her hand, and the doom was not doom at all, but merely
the silent, sharp arrow, the close-hurled stone, that did not end life so much as it merged, so that bunny and
Diana became one. When the last bone was picked by the secret campfire in the trees, bunny still lived, in the
brush as well as in Diana, and bunny flowed at one with the milk that nursed her infant child.
Maybe hate was not the right word. Maybe it was despise, the way Diana felt about the hunters, and it was not
just the hunters. The hunters were wonderful compared to the dirt bikers, the developers and the residents of
the houses and condominiums that pressed in from all sides.
The hunters at least wanted the environment to exist as it was. They left it as they found it (when they didn't
accidentally burn it down); sometimes they even defended it against the march of progress, even though they
themselves were a part of that progress.
 If Diana had hated them, any of them, she would have killed them. What a time that would have been, while
it lasted! Hunters found dead of multiple arrow wounds, the arrows removed and the bodies bled dry. Bulldozer
drivers found slumped over their controls, flies buzzing about the remains, equipment quiet and work undone.
Developers and real estate agents face down next to their cars on the remote dirt roads.
Settlers dead in their yards.
Diana called them settlers, the hordes of prosperous families that moved into each row of housing as it was
completed and sold, who rejoiced over the majestic views and the succulent privacy, and who wailed in tragedy
when the next wave of destruction construction began to play out before their eyes, who raged betrayal when
their views were taken from them, replaced by more streets and houses and lights, robbing them of sunsets
and moonrises and wild vistas. What a time that would have been, had the mistress of the moon really hated
them, had these wild vistas begun to spit the occasional arrow into the heart of a settler. What a thrill to live
on the frontier it would have been, to know that an evening stroll might likely end with a short bloody crawl
across the sidewalk with a merciless shaft protruding from one's back.
Neither Diana nor her son had ever believed that such a campaign would ever find victory. Martyrdom would
have been the more likely conclusion, with misunderstanding and general social disapproval thrown on top. It
would have been, rebellion; it would have been war. It would have been open conflict, and the government
would have escalated the force to whatever power was required to put an end to the crazy lady with the bow, and
her quiet and deadly son.
You name it. Helicopters, flame throwers, boots and helmets and flak jackets, automatic weapons, command
posts, surveillance triggers and land mines, whatever it would have taken, it would have been employed, to
stamp out this pocket of insane rebellion.
But had she truly hated the intruders, Diana would have made that sacrifice, and would have gone down in
flames with her war-cry on her lips.       
* * *
* * *
A study was commissioned once which followed speculations similar to those of Tawngness, in reference to
unrestrained predation of the human population in India. Cat One found a reference to this odd work when
browsing in the library at Ol' Grey. She looked it up in its obscure socio-journal.
Where Tawngness had urged Johnny to imagine tigers at work in India to limit the population, the
mathematicians who had devised this grisly model did not specify the nature of the predator, and provided
figures relating to not only India, but the United States and the world as well. The reality of the predators,
tigers or whatever, was reduced to numbers with odd labels, such as land area in square miles, farms, ideal
population, present population, normal growth rate, annual kill, daily kill (dk), dk/sq.mi, active predators (ap),
ap/sq.mi., predator population, predator family (pf)/sq.mi, territory of pf, round dimension, square dimension,
100 year solution, needed rate of decline, and so on.
From the charts and data offered, Cat One observed that to maintain the populations that the statisticians for
whatever reasons deemed ideal, required a daily kill per square mile of only .005. This seemed very small to
Cat, and she inverted it, seeing then that it meant that each day there would be a human kill, on the average,
for each two hundred square miles. Another quick calculation suggested that, if evenly spaced across the whole
range, these daily kills would occur once in every fourteen miles, on the average, in any direction.
Life would be pretty exciting in that neighborhood, she decided. She discussed it with Agnes Tawney. This had
been back when Cat was still a student, still a dabbling dilettante.
"Sometimes these scientists get carried away with their theories," Agnes suggested. "What did they propose
for the ideal population of this country?"
"About a hundred million."
Agnes couldn't really argue with that. She might have come with a number closer to one million on her own,
or, better yet, one thousand. She listened to Cat expressing her own impressions of the silly little study.
"Imagine what that would be like," she was saying, casting a playful, haunted look about her. They were
sitting on a granite outcrop on the south side of Clark's Hill. Down below they could see the road that led to
Collins Cove.
"Imagine if every time you went out you were in real danger of getting bagged."
"That's true now," Agnes returned. “That’s true down in the city. That’s even true down there.” They each
turned to look ‘down there,’ down at the lonesome crossroad outside of town where two half-baked, would-be
predators had met their doom a generation earlier.
Agnes grew silent and remembered herself what it had been like to watch from the darkness as Andrea was
mauled. Like a doe back in among the trees, she had watched the fawn in the jaws of the wolves.
Of the dogs, she corrected herself, recalling her disgust. What were they doing, nipping at her heels? Toying
with her like a rubber ball? Teasing Andrea Clare with rough stuff and tough talk and this pushy, hands-down-
the-pants thing? Agnes could easily imagine herself with the ten-gauge, leveling instant justice upon Carl and
Clyde. Instead, she could only watch, and wait. In retrospect, it was easy to see how well this innocent ploy
turned out.
Had she given into the impulse to burst into the glare of the headlights, an old woman shaking a stick in rage,
the very universe would have been lost. Would have been, but wasn't, so it was alright, and parallel universes
be damned. She would probably have been shot.
She would probably have been shot. And then Andrea Clare Devlin would have been shot. Perhaps Tom and
Joe Devlin would then have been spared. Perhaps beautiful, gentle, lovely, wonderful Glow Dolan would also
have been left to live. Perhaps Old Fargo then would have been a hero even in the eyes of the law. Perhaps.
But Andrea Clare Devlin would be dead. There would never be a Catherine Marie Dolan. Though Gloria Dolan
were to survive and thrive and live to be the fond old lady that Cat One never knew, there would have been no
Cat One to know her or to miss her.
There would have been no Vikor. How awesome the power she wielded, that little old lady on a stormy, snowy
night. How broad the stroke, how deep the slash… she wielded her humble sword in the darkness. She did
nothing, and civilization was rocked to its core.
* * *
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