Never take a Yank city boy on a wild goat hunt
This happened three summers ago. My goat nightmares persist.
NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA -- We rolled along the red-dirt track in a sort of bush caravan, moving stealthily like big cats on the prowl.
We were on a hunt for wild goats.
Michael Karaitiana stopped the lead truck, a husky white range-ute with a CB antennae swaying on the hood.
He surveyed a landscape of vast open fields punctuated by groves of jacaranda trees and pointed to something in the quivering distance.
“You see that mob over there, mate?”
His son-in-law Harley, a strapping lad with the name of Michael’s daughter, Karla Joy, tattooed on his neck, followed Michael’s finger into the haze.
“Yeah, I see ‘em, moving toward those trees.”
I, too, looked.
I squinted. I peered. I scrutinized.
But I, of course, saw nothing.
There were seven of us – six people in Michael’s tight family circle, and myself, the outlier.
The sore thumb. The Yank couch potato.
There was Michael’s wife, Mandy, a capable mother of five who runs a girl’s gymnastics program in the community center across the road from the family home in Tullamore, a rural town of a few hundred residents some 500 miles east of Sydney.
Along with Travis and Karla, there was Michael’s 21-year-old son Marshall – a quiet, watchful electrician and singer, and Michael’s 14-year-old nephew Lawrence, a neophyte whom the family had taken in after his parents’ divorce.
The billy goat ancestors of our prey were once-domesticated animals that had long ago escaped from local ranches and formed wandering mobs. For Michael and his family, they amounted to financial gold.
Michael could sell the animals for $80 a head. One-hundred goats could bring $8,000, no small sum for a truck driver, mechanic and all-around opportunistic handyman who worked hard for a living.
The land belonged to a wealthy rancher-turned-beekeeper for whom Michael had done projects, building sheds and fences. The owner told Michael to take as many wild goats as he needed.
Michael knew the land intimately; he’d built, rebuilt or repaired most of the fences on the sprawling ranch.
Michael, who’s one-half Maori, was our field general. At 54, a wiry man with a graying mullet and boxer’s physique, he’d worked such wild goat hunts all of his life. He knew the drill, knew that the goats were frightened by the slightest noise, such as the sound of an approaching truck.
Some days before, he had driven two old ranch wrecks to strategic spots out onto the landscape, the type of vehicles started by touching ignition wires rather than the turn of any key.
We huddled around Michael, who issued our marching orders: Marshall and Lawrence would hike out to one of the utes and head off any goats that moved in their direction.
Mandy was to stay on the present dirt track as a rear-defense and backup while Michael, Harley, Karla and I crept another half-mile down the track to where Michael had stored an four-wheel ATV.
When we reached the spot, we eased out of the car. Michael warned us to be quiet, but too late. I had already slammed the door and I watched Michael wince. I scolded myself under my breath, “No. More. Fuckups. Mate.”
Michael motioned for us all to squat down low. He could hear the goats moving in the nearby brush. He was planning an ambush to move the mob toward a trap he’d set, a fenced-in area around a small pond a half-mile off.
He was like a native guide, hearing things few others could hear, interpreting tracks on the road, craftily outfoxing the goats.
Then came a rush of action. Michael hopped atop the ATV and set off into the trees through the waist-high brush.
“Karla! Take the ute down that road! Harley walk into the woods that way! John, you go in that way!”
Excuse me?
You mean wade into unknown terrain, off the safety of the dirt track, and enter a landscape full of lethal predators (something like seven of the planet’s most poisonous spiders and snakes live here) in a wild land where even a newborn puppy could kill you?
Couldn’t I just ride in the car?
Damn.
I headed into the bush, walking delicately at first, watching each footfall, picking my way through the jacaranda grove as though wading through a waist-high swamp.
Emerging on the far side, I came upon a chase already at hand:
There was the rush of bleating of goats, with Michael in pursuit atop the ATV, rolling expertly along the blotchy uneven open field. It was beautiful in a way, a primal hunter with ancient instincts and modern tools.
His hat had flown off and his hair blew in the wind. Marshall and Lawrence moved in from behind in one ute, Karla in the other.
As the chase ensued, small clutches of frightened kangaroos bounded away from the approaching pack, this time not the quarry. The goats were momentarily redirected by a flock of emu, large flightless birds – a distant cousin of the ostrich – that can kill a dog with one swift kick.
Just then, a large horned-goat broke off from the pack and rushed past me into the woods, as desperate as a prison escapee.
For a nanosecond, we assessed one another.
He was wild-eyed.
So was I.
By the time I emerged into the field, the chase had moved well beyond. In the distance, I could see the vehicles fanning out, with Michael waving directions from atop his ATV.
Bringing up the rear, I saw that the mob was already inside the trap, 25 goats moving skittishly in a tight clutch. Karla was posted on one end, outside the trap; I was on the other, as Michael and the others moved inside the fence.
The idea was to wrestle down and hog-tie the goats one at a time. It was like an old-school ranch roundup that has taken place for generations across the American West, but these wranglers had Aussie accents, shouting at one another in a brogue and dialect I often found difficult to decipher.
But, unfortunately, I understood this directive:
“John,” Michael said, “when the goats get near the fence, reach in and grab one by the horns. Watch his head, though. Make sure he doesn’t gore ya!”
Um, understood, I think.
Then Michael lunged at one billy goat, snatching his head and swinging him around until he gained leverage. Quickly, the goat was on its back as Michael leaned in to expertly tie up his legs, as the goat cried out in terror. This was no bleat; this was a all-out primal scream that, eerily, sounded almost human.
Once the animal laws subdued, Michael reached down and stroked its neck, speaking gently, perhaps trying to calm it.
“You’re a wild boy, aren’t ya?”
Then he lifted up the goat by the legs and horns and hoisted him over the chest-high wire fence to me.
“Step on his neck, John,” he instructed. “Watch his horns.” And then he moved off.
I knelt down next to the goat, gripping its legs and horns. I could smell its wildness, its goatness. It had large brown eyes and slants for irises. It would rest for a moment and then struggle and cry out.
I felt its pain. In an odd reverse of the Stockholm syndrome, the captor related to the captive.
After all, this was not my battle, I thought. On one hand, I wanted to help the family, but on the other my instincts were to unravel the ropes and let the animal go. I suppose anyone who was raised on a farm or ranch would consider such feelings as folly. Animals were part of the food chain. They die so we can live.
This place was rural and alive. And, as a whole, these were hard men who scraped out a life here. In queasy contrast, I was an urban faux-hipster from the bloody states, somebody who got an occasional pedicure or manicure, who was now far afield and an ocean away from his element.
I listened to the animal’s labored breathing.
“If it were up to me, boy, I’d let you go,” I said. “But it’s not.”
Marshall soon pulled up in a ute and we tossed the goat in with several others; bleating, hog-tied – packed like suburban soccer kids being carted off to a Saturday afternoon game.
For an hour, I waited and watched as the men lunged at the goats one by one, occasionally stepping up to the fence if the pack came my way, yelling “Hah! Hah!”
At one point, Michael called over to me, “Goat hunting takes patience,” he said. “It’s a pain in the ass but just wait for the barbeque!”
Then Mandy pulled up.
She’d heard the ruckus but had been delayed by several bees that flew into her car, eventually discouraged by a few frantic waves of a coat. As the pack was picked off one by one, Mandy and Karla moved inside the fence to capture the last animal – women holding their place among men.
As the afternoon wore on, we loaded two-dozen goats into a makeshift cage Michael assembled on the back of one ute, his rough catcher’s mitt-sized hands expertly twirling wrenches and tying wires.
Marshall moved in to a corral the size of a small kitchen to grab goats and haul them over to his father, who tossed them into the cage. Lawrence and I stood by to make sure no animal squirmed out of Michael’s grasp and made a run for it.
In all, there were some 60 goats, but Michael wanted more. He knew the main mob had split in half during the initial chase. With the sun setting, we moved along another dirt road trying to flush out the rest.
“There!” Michael shouted at a mob of 30 goats. He turned his ute onto the open field, me holding onto the safety handle, wishing I’d buckled my seat belt. We rumbled along like a motorized sheep dog, racing to head off the pack. Onto one side, Marshall and Harley sped past in another truck.
I looked over just in time to see their vehicle hit a ditch and spin wickedly to one side, nearly rolling over, dust flying.
We stopped to provide them a jack to fix a flat tire.
I was just glad I wasn’t inside that truck, but the pair laughed it off.
“That was the most fun I’ve had all day,” Harley said.
The goats were gone, but Michael wasn’t giving up. As dusk came on, he was back on the ATV, rolling through the thicket, trying to scare the pack back out onto the open. I waited with Marshall, who talked about family and his new life in Darwin.
It was a peaceful moment in a day of aggression and screaming animals, as flocks of galahs rose from the bush – white cockatoos whose undersides flashed red as they spread their wings to leave the ground.
Suddenly, we heard a faint “Woo! Woo!” call, like a scout signaling his regiment.
“It’s my Dad,” Marshall said matter-of-factly. “He’s found the goats.”
We never caught the second pack that day, though no fault to Michael. All day long, he’d led the efforts, grabbing the first goats, starting vehicles that wouldn’t start, lying on his back underneath overheated chassis in the red dust.
At one point, he brought to life one stubborn old ute, a battered red 20-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser, using a product with a particularly Australian name: NULON “Start Ya Bastard” instant engine starter.
The engine roaring to life, we hopped inside. Back behind the wheel, Michael turned to me and smiled.
“Welcome to Australia, mate,” he shouted over the din.
Indeed.
Then we were off to rejoin the chase.
