A Dead Goat

I found a dead goat in front of the gate this morning. I wouldn't have seen it
at all except for the flies buzzing around it. Who looks for a dead goat when
she is walking from the castle to her workshop planning to take a nap and throw
a pot not necessarily in that order?

["Castle" is a misnomer. It's just a large, expensive house, quite modern.]

But there it was, a dead goat. I could tell it was a goat by the horns, and it
was even easier to see that it was dead. There was blood, but not too much.
Nothing had gotten to it yet, so it must have been recently put there. Then I
saw that it had a bloody spot in it's chest. I just stood and stared at it for
a minute or so, then it came to me, forensic scientist that I am not, that it
had been shot, poor thing. I continued to stare, and look around at the
landscape and the road, and think. What was a goat doing at my front gate?
What was a goat doing anywhere near my front gate, for that matter?

I thought about what I was to do now, with the goat, I mean? That's me all
over, always thinking of myself and never thinking of the goat. I could drag it
off somewhere and bury it, I supposed. As soon as I thought of that, I looked
at the ground around the goat and realized all at once that someone had dragged
it here. It hadn't been shot here, it had been shot somewhere else and dragged
here. I stared some more. Why would anyone want to shoot a goat and drag it to
my front gate? Then, taking the question in two parts, why would anyone want to
shoot a goat? Then, having answered that question I could move on to the second
question, why drag it to my front gate? I drew a complete blank on both
questions.

But I did think I would try to answer those questions before I disposed of the
goat. One doesn't think of disposing a suddenly appearing dead goat in the same
cavalier manner as one might think of refilling an ice tray, for example. It's
one thing to not worry too much about what happened to all the ice cubes and
another to not wonder how a dead goat got to your front gate.

I thought some more. Goats do not live in the wild around here. That goat
belongs to someone, or used to belong to someone. So fine, now who? I didn't
have any close neighbors that I knew of. I looked once more up and down the
road. I always went to the left, to go to town. I couldn't remember ever going
to the right to see what was further down the road. I wondered why I never did
that? Not curious, I expect. How far does one drag a dead goat? I looked at
the dirt driveway to see how far the drag marks went. They seemed to go to the
road. I walked along the driveway towards the road. The drag marks stopped at
the road's edge. Somebody had taken the goat out of something, dropped it onto
the driveway, and dragged it to my gate.

I was really getting into this
detective thing. That thought was immediately followed by another. Shouldn't I
tell someone about this? Who, for example? The police? Call 911? I had no
idea if 911 would work out here. Did the town have a police force? I didn't
know. But surely there was a Sheriff somewhere. There was one in every county.
But would the Sheriff care about a dead goat? Maybe it would make a difference
if it had been shot, but I didn't know. Guns and shooting them is pretty common
these days, and the goat didn't seem very important, but that could have been
because it was dead. It might have been important enough to report if it were
alive.

Which started another string of reasoning. The goat, my detective mind told me
abruptly, must have belonged to somebody. But who? The questions pushed up
like weeds after rain. My mind went back to the road to the right of my
driveway. Maybe sombody who lived in that direction owned the goat? Maybe I
should try to find them, ask around. "Anybody missing a goat? Anybody know of
anybody shooting a goat recently?" If anybody answered, I could follow up with
"Why did you drop the dead goat at my front gate? What am I supposed to do with
it?"

With that idea in mind, I left the goat exactly where I had found it, opened the
gate, walked back to the castle to get my car and drove down the driveway to make
a right turn onto the road, carefully avoiding the goat. It felt like the right
thing to do, somehow.