My old partner in mischief who by now actually “is” old, consulted me via text message, recently about a goat problem.

He had two and they had amplified goatish habits. They ate things that are basically inedible including rubber boots, horse bridles, wedding dresses, fiberglass, outboard motor covers, etc. They climb on roofs with the least provocation and have a radar sense at detecting unwary exposed buttocks

He wanted some advice short of a Labor Day barbecue. I suggested he tie them to old car tires and limit their mischief to mowing the yard. In theory it would cut down on fuel expenses for the lawn mower. That worked for about as long as it took them to chew through the rope and eat the tires.

Option number two was to harness them together to alter their climbing habits and hope they would hang one another. I suggested he used stainless steel chains for the connections. That seemed to do the trick, but it worked a little too well. They mowed the lawn while dragging a stick of pulpwood behind them. They did such a good job at mowing and dragging their by-products into neat piles that old Frank was impressed enough to start thinking about other uses for the horny old pests.

At first things went pretty well. They cleared off a garden spot and after we broke it up they harrowed it down with the pulpwood log. Trouble arrived after the beans and tomatoes came up. They ate them promptly.

We replanted and built a fence. About the time the second crop came up they demonstrated their ability to jump a four-foot fence and decimated the second crop overnight. That’s when we decided to permanently re-attach them to the pulpwood log. That was a good fix but ol’ Frank got to thinking (which was not his department). He had watched a horse race where a horse would pull a driver on a two-wheeled, lightweight buggy contraption called a racing hack.

“You know them goats are pretty fast and if we built a real light-weighted cart and put bicycle wheels on it they just might be good for two or three furlongs and we could enter ‘em in a timed race at the county fair over in Forrest City.”

I was young and profoundly ignorant concerning goats. I knew people hooked them to wagons for kids to ride, so I didn’t see why they couldn’t be trained for the track. We should have given more thought to the matter, because one goat, although they were equal in height, had shorter legs than the other, which made them tend to turn in circles.

We had the makeshift hackney finished and Frank went as far as to paint it. We rigged up the harness from old plow lines. (Don’t ever paint a piece of equipment until you’ve tested it).

Frank decided to do a shakedown run (sort of a live fire exercise) before I got there that morning. Them goats got into high gear and made a high speed circle into the height extended garden fence, the buggy being easier to pull than the log. The goats went over the fence but Frank and the hackney didn’t.

Frank was of the sort that didn’t give up easily, so after I got some wire cutters and cut him out of the barbed wire, we herded up the goats. They were, for once, ignoring the garden. Instead they were eating the remains of the harness off each other.

We went back to the drawing board. He said, “The leg length is the problem. We’ve got 26-inch tires on what’s left of it, so all we’ve got to do is put a smaller tire on the long goat side to compensate for the drift.”

I pointed out that if there was a way to steer a racing goat I hadn’t heard about it.

“Of course not. They’re the first of the breed,” he said.

We accomplished the modifications and patched the buggy back together overnight. The second trial went pretty good until he tried out the steering mechanism which he used to swat the goats’ faces to make them turn the opposite way.

That only further aggravated the team and they made for the first cedar fence posts they could find, picked out he sturdiest one in sight and divided forces. One went left and the other right, leaving the hackney and Frank wrapped around the post. I found a hammer, chisel and hacksaw and wrangled old Frank out of the scrap iron.

“You got any contingency plans now?” I asked.

“Yep, it’s two days to the fair, you go get some rest,” he told me. “I’ve got work to do that’ll take most of the night and we’ve got a full day tomorrow.”

I went home and he went to the scrap yard and stocked up on materials.

When I saw the new machine he’d put together overnight I was astonished and overjoyed. I knew it was a winner and it was. We took the prize at the fair and got a nice trophy.

Not for the race because we didn’t enter it. We entered the barbecue contest and took first place. There’s quite a trick to cooking a tough old racing goat. The trick is in the marinade, but that is a family secret.

Retired from racing and proud of it,

Ricky Harpole
(Contact Harpole at www.facebook.com/harpolive)