“Have you shot a goat before?”: a f**ked-up hunting story by a New Plymouth writer
The truck lurched through the deep, trenched track. Tim gripped the steering wheel, I braced myself against the door pillar. We came across a farmer heading down the track on a quad bike. He stopped in front of us. There was no space to pass. He had big shoulders and a black, stubbled jaw, and blue overalls. Tim began to back the truck. He put his left hand on the shoulder of my seat. It was fifty metres or so back down to where there was a turning area, a difficult task with a farmer watching. The farmer slowly trailed us, five metres behind, the engine of his quad bike popping softly.
When we arrived at the turning area, the farmer pulled up next to us. Tim lowered his window.
“Hauyegaun,” the farmer said.
“Yeah alright,” said Tim. “Heading into Taramoukou to look for some goats.”
Tim was trying a little bit too hard to lower his voice—it sounded like he had unresolved tension in his chest. The farmer tilted his head slightly to look at my face, then back at Tim.
“Best park down here,” he said. “Walk up through the saddle.”
“Will do. Thanks,” said Tim.
“Yeah thanks,” I said, leaning forward and waving.
“No worries,” said the farmer.
The farmer rode away down the hill and we parked in a sodden clearing just off the road. Tim switched off the motor and we hopped out. A sheep bleated from the paddock below. A kererū flew over the clearing. The ground was muddy. We walked to the back of the truck and Tim opened the door. He unzipped a long, black bag, slid out his gun, held it flat above his waist and tilted it in the light.
“Three-o-eight,” he said, with a tinge of pride.
The stock was made of varnished pine. He moved his hands to the firing position and pointed the barrel at the ground. At the tip was a hefty silencer: about 12 inches of textured black steel. I reached out and ran the outside of my fingers down the black steel muzzle. I whistled softly.
“Pretty serious,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Tim. “Bit bigger than my twenty-two, anyway.”
We suited up and walked up the track. Tim carried the gun. I had a pair of binoculars for ‘glassing the goats.’
The track cut the ridge in the trough of a saddle. On the other side there was a wire fence and then native bush fringed with gorse. Tim was talking about pig dogs.
“You’ve got bailers and you’ve got holders. Bailers are faster and they tire the pig out by chasing it and surrounding it. Holders are bigger and slower, they get there after the bailers and hold the pig by the ears so when you catch up you can stick it.”
Tim demonstrated with an upward stabbing motion.
“How do you train them to do that?” I asked. “The dogs, I mean.”
“Mainly by watching other dogs, I think. And by instinct.”
I imagined an unbroken chain of dogs training dogs going back thousands of years.
“How did they train the first dog?” I asked.
Tim paused.
“Fuck knows.”
The track descended steeply down into the belly of the valley where the ground got squelchy. We stooped under lolling ponga fronds and mānuka bush. There were mosquitos.
The track turned sharply and emerged on the side of the swampy floor of the valley. In front of us was a little creek winding along the edge and beyond it was dense Raupō amongst other species of cutty grass. There were some slippery logs arranged into a rudimentary bridge over the creek. I crossed first then waited for Tim. He looked a bit unbalanced with his big pack and the gun. He tightened the straps on his pack. I stepped close to the edge and offered my hand.
“Grab my hand.”
Tim shook his head.
“Na bro, I’m sweet.”
But he looked uneasy. He stepped onto the slippery logs and began shuffling his way across. When he got to halfway, he wobbled. I offered my hand again, palm up-facing, and Tim grabbed it. His hand was soft and warm. I pulled him to safety.
We set off parallel along the valley, walking side by side in a meandering weave between the grasses. Every ten metres or so we would stop and scan the clearings along either side with the binoculars.
“Have you shot a goat before?” I asked.
“Na.”
We pressed on and the valley became narrower—the grasses longer and cuttier. There were small trees growing in the middle of the valley floor. Beneath the grass the earth became rutted, difficult to move through, so we decided to head over to the northern side of the valley where the grass was lower, alongside the riverbank. The walking was easier there and we made good ground. We stepped softly, trying not to make any unnecessary noise which might alert the goats to our presence.
I spotted movement on the fringe of a clearing across the valley, perhaps two-hundred metres, on the southern side, just under the treeline. I whispered for Tim to stop and we knelt together behind a flax. I popped my head up and, using the binoculars, spotted the back half of a small, black goat, its head behind a branch of a tree. Its little black tail was wagging slightly as it tugged at the bushes. We watched it for a moment and then it disappeared into the dark bush. Tim loaded the rifle. We left our bags on the ground and crept along the riverbank, staying low, and we saw the goat appear again to the left in another clearing. We could see its head now. It had white ears like a rabbit and a little black beard under its chin. It stood perfectly still, chewing softly. Its strange eyes poked out the sides of its head. Tim tried to aim the gun.
“Need to get a bit higher up,” he said, pointing up into the bush behind us.
We climbed up the steep bank through the pungas until Tim found a place to sit the gun on the branch of a tree. I crouched at his feet and watched the goat through the binoculars. In the interim a second goat had appeared in the clearing, half the size of the first but with the same black and white colouring. It was a strange thing to witness—these two goats enjoying their private moment in the clearing together. They stood chewing, unperturbed by the other’s presence. I wondered about the lifespan of goats, and what course of events had led these particular goats to be here, now, in this clearing, staring out into space, chewing cud.
“There’s another one,” Tim said.
A third goat had appeared, a bit smaller than the first, and pure white. It was busy tucking-in to a gorse bush that hung out over the clearing.
There was an enormous bang. I jumped, almost dropping the binoculars.
“Fuck’s sake, Tim.”
I brought the binoculars back to my eyes just in time to see the first black goat tumbling down the bank through the grass, its head flopping about wildly. It looked like it was making a lot of noise, but we were too far away to hear anything. My heart was racing.
“Did I get it?” Tim asked.
“Yeah it’s dying now,” I said.
The goat was on its side, kicking as though it were trying to run. The smaller black goat stood a few metres away watching it. I had the binoculars pressed hard into my eye sockets. The white goat continued to nibble the gorse—it didn’t seem to have noticed. I heard the click-clack of Tim loading another bullet.
“Which one are you going to kill next?” I asked.
“The white one,” he said, lifting the rifle back onto the branch of the tree.
A part of me willed the two remaining goats to move, but they just stood there stupidly, chewing, goat-like. There was another enormous bang and I dropped the binoculars completely. I picked them back up in time to see the white goat rolling down the bank to lie writhing next to the first goat, which now appeared to have died. The third goat, the little black one, just stood there watching the others.
Tim reloaded the gun.
“Better kill the little one too,” he said.
But as he spoke, the little black goat bounded away and into the dark bush, and I felt the weight in my chest lighten slightly.
“Bugger,” said Tim.
“Yeah bugger,” I said.
I glassed the two humps: one white, one black, lying on the long, green grass. Neither moved. We prepared to cross the valley to collect them. Tim led the way. We descended back into the floor of the valley and became immersed in dense, red grasses, coming up to our armpits.
Tim suddenly held up his hand, then cupped it to his ear. A rhythmic echo came reverberating down along the valley, getting louder. He pointed. It was a pair of paradise ducks, one male, one female, flying in convoy along the side of the valley, quacking incessantly. They passed us and then began a slow arc back around. Tim and I stood still, watching them. Around and around us they went, making a racket to alert the whole valley to our presence.
We crossed the river by jumping into the mud on the other side, scrambled up the bank, through a dense thicket of cutty grass and up through gorse and bracken, to the clearing where the two goats lay. I arrived first and was hit with a horrible smell—a warm, sickly mix of shit and acid. The sound of the ducks rose and fell with each lap of the valley.
Tim looked a bit queasy. The two goats lay splayed out in the deep grass. They were a lot smaller than they had seemed through the binoculars. The larger, black goat would have looked quite peaceful had its mouth not been wide open with its thick pink tongue sticking out. The small, white one looked as though it was attempting to get up—its back was arched dramatically and its front legs were sort of climbing the bank. It had a cavernous hole in its ribcage with a bit of distended intestine hanging out. The smell appeared to be coming from this dark hole. Inside, I could see a mess of green sludge and tubing.
“Fuck bro,” I said. “You hit it in the guts.”
They had both died with their eyes open. I knelt down beside the black one. I wondered if it was properly dead yet. Its eye was perfectly clear and seemed like it could move at any second. Its ear was beautiful, erect and shapely, soft skin on the inside and fringed with fine, white fur. I reached out and stroked its neck softly. It was still warm. I still wasn’t sure what to say. It was a peculiar situation. It didn’t feel like we should be celebrating.
“Guess we should take a photo?” I said.
Tim was still standing back, looking down at the white goat.
“Good idea,” he said flatly.
I pulled out my phone. Tim laid the rifle flat on the grass in front, then knelt between them and delicately grasped one of the horns of the black one. He considered the white one for a moment, picked it up by the horn and flipped it over so the gaping hole was hidden away. It looked light—barely bigger than a large housecat. He arranged the two goat heads so they looked like they were looking at the camera, then he looked up at me and smiled. I snapped a couple of photos and cupped my phone screen to check. Tim dropped the two heads and wiped his hands on his pants.
“Which one do you want to carry?” he asked.
“I’ll take the black one,” I said.
“Alright.”
I stood over the goat and gingerly gathered its front legs together and gripped them in my right hand, its rear legs with my left. I picked it up slowly, careful to keep it from touching my body. Its head dangled in the long grass. I threw it up and over my shoulders. Its ribs bumped against my neck and I felt its warm innards sloshing around. Its head hung under my left arm, brushing against my side. I shivered and suppressed the desire to fling it off. Tim held the little white goat at arms-length, avoiding the green sludge that dripped from the bullet hole.
We stomped our way back through the long grass, Tim slightly ahead. The ground beneath the grass was swampy and rutted. I took a step and my foot slipped into a deep trench, and in slow motion, I fell backwards. I tried to throw the goat off but as I landed deep in the grasses it became tangled about my head, its stomach smooshed against my face. I panicked and yelled, trying to push it away, but merely flipped it, causing the head to dangle on my chest. Tim came crashing through the bushes.
“You alright bro?”
“Yeah, the goat landed on me,” I said, panting.
I disengaged myself from the goat, stood up, and looked back down where it was lying with its head awkwardly bent underneath the weight of its body. I felt a pang of guilt about it. I hefted it back onto my shoulders and we continued through the grass.
At the edge of the river, Tim slid down the muddy bank and trudged through the water. As I descended I slipped and was buried up to my shins in the muddy bank, overbalanced, lost control of my goat and dropped it in the river.
By the time I retrieved it I had lost all concern for the dignity of the dead goat. The inconvenience of carrying it was enough to induce apathy toward the soggy corpse. I crossed the river and when I reached our packs, I cast it on the ground with a thud. I stood there looking down at it. It had landed in quite a strange way—on its side, with its rear hooves arranged as though it were trotting. I bent down and posed its front legs to match the rear, raised its tail, and lifted its head, giving it a sort of haughty, carefree look. I smiled, then looked up to see Tim watching me, rolling a joint.
“Wanna blaze?” he asked, holding it up.
We stood over the dead goat, passing the joint between us. It began to rain. I pulled the hood up on my raincoat.
“That’s kind of weird bro,” Tim said. “Posing a dead animal like that.”
He rolled it over with his foot.
“How do we cut it up?” I asked.
“We just take the legs,” he said, pointing with the joint. “I watched a YouTube video.”
Tim puffed away, the joint crackled, and a cloud of yellow smoke drifted out from under the hood of his jacket. The rain pattered on my hood.
“You’re the only person I really blaze with these days,” said Tim.
“Really?” I said, smiling. “That’s nice. You’re the only one I blaze with, too.”
“You can finish it.”
He handed me the joint, took out his knife and knelt down next to the black goat. He rolled it onto its back and gripped one of the rear legs just inside the hoof, opening it so the goat’s penis and testicles hung like a furry blossom in the baldness of its groin. Pulling the leg straight, he put the knife on the inside crease where it connected with the hip. He began sawing at the tight skin. It opened in little rips, exposing the pink muscle beneath. The goat shook from side to side as he sawed, head nodding, tongue wagging, and through the cut I could see the muscles of the leg moving beneath a sheath of white fascia. Suddenly, Tim stopped, putting his knife hand on his knee.
“What’s up bro?” I asked.
I could hear him breathing deeply.
“You all good?”
He dropped the knife, stood up, and walked to the edge of the clearing where he bent down over a small gorse bush. I followed and stood by his side.
“Jeez bro, you all good?” I asked.
He held up his hand, then his body convulsed in a violent retch, neck bulging. Nothing came out. I reached out my arm and lightly patted the top of his back.
“You all good bro?” I asked again.
He spat on the ground then started a long cough that turned into another extended retch.
“Let me know if you need any water, bro,” I said.
It was awkward, just standing there. I walked back to where the dead goat was lying on the wet grass. The knife was at my feet. I picked it up and looked back at Tim. He was still bent over the bush. The knife was heavy—like something a soldier would carry—with a distinctive bevel running down each side and there was a short strip of serration on the topside. It had a stylised black and grey tang. It looked angry. I stood over the goat with the sound of Tim dry-retching behind me. I knelt down and inspected the cut he had made. Gripping the leg just above the hoof, as I’d seen Tim do, I pulled it away from the body, revealing the cut in the crease between the groin and the inside of the thigh. The muscles and ligaments were visible through a pale white layer of fascia. I levered the leg away from the body and it reflexed at the knee, kicking the hoof out straight. As I moved it back and forth I could see the muscles sliding against each other, as if through a light denier stocking. I surprised myself by not finding this disgusting. Perhaps it was the weed, but I found that I could flip through different conceptions of the corpse at will. For example, if I took in the whole goat at once—that is, if I saw it as a constitutional whole; if I concentrated on its fur, its face, the way its neck ran into its shoulder, its complete mammal-ness—then I felt sick. It was like looking at a sleeping dog. In its wholeness, it desired a sort of reverence—it felt criminal to start sawing away at its leg. But if I concentrated on the cut itself, it became anatomical. Oddly, my brain seemed reluctant, or incapable, of processing both the internal and external at the same time. I could see a dead goat with a cut in its leg, or, I could see an aperture of bovine anatomy, but I could not see both at once.
Keen to avoid Tim’s fate, I leaned in close and, like a surgeon, took the tip of the knife and made a little incision in the fascia while pulling the leg outward. The fascia tore and revealed the deep maroon and blue of the muscle beneath. Then, little by little, I navigated the fibrous connective tissue surrounding the joint, searching the edges of the bone until I reached the little hip socket—a small, blue egg of bone. As the leg came away from the body it immediately ceased to have the character of a limb and became a cut of meat. I tossed it onto the grass beside me, rotated the corpse and started on the other one. It occurred to me that one important purpose of butchering must be to disguise the meat so it no longer resembles the animal that it came from—a kind of abstraction. I made quick work of the other leg, then moved on to the front legs. After that I gutted it, pulling the colourful jumble of tubing from the inside of the ribs. I was pleased with how well I had done.
By this stage Tim had stopped retching and was sitting on a log nearby, watching me work. He still looked quite pale. Most of the goat was now in parts, largely deconstructed. Its various components lay strewn around me on the grass, like Lego, or some flat-pack furniture.
“You’re pretty good at that,” Tim said.
“Thanks.”
I looked at the head with its bulbous eyes and tongue hanging out. I stared at the face and tried to visit the knowledge that less than an hour before this thing was walking around, thinking thoughts and chewing cud, and I felt a little jolt of sadness, but it was difficult to hold the thought in my mind. I recalled a similar sensation, standing at Granny’s coffin, staring intently at her face, trying, but failing, to make a cognisant connection between the life-like model lying in front of me and the person that I’d loved and argued with. It was only after I sat down, so only her aquiline nose was visible above the sides of the casket, that I choked up, remembering the way it used to wiggle and twitch like a rabbit’s, when she leaned over the stove to smell pea and ham soup.
“What do I do with the head and body?” I asked. “Do we have to bury it?”
“Just chuck it in the bushes. The pigs will find it.”
I carried it out of the clearing and up into the bush, lay it carefully in a shallow depression, gathered an armful of punga fronds and covered it up. I returned to camp where Tim had packed up the legs into some plastic bags and distributed them between our backpacks.
It took us an hour and a half to get back to the truck. Tim got out the keys but then stalled for a moment, fiddling with them nervously.
“Is it all good if we don’t mention me getting sick?”
“Yeah, no worries bro. It was probably just the weed anyway, could have happened to anyone.”
“Yeah true.”
We loaded up the car and drove back down the track. When we reached the main road we came across a ute heading back up the way we came. We pulled alongside. There were two men in the front and some dogs in the back.
“You boys see anything in there?” one of them asked.
I put my elbow out the window.
“Got a couple goats.”
Both the men tipped their heads back in recognition. I lifted my eyebrows at them, tipped my head back, then turned to look out the front of the truck as Tim pulled away.
Last week's short story "My Octopus Teacher" was also by Fergus Porteous. This marks the first time Newsroom has ever published consecutive short stories by the same writer.
Next week's short story, set inside a retirement village, is by George Mandow.
