9

THE ANIMAL ADMIRERS

He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four

That stood beside his bed:

He looked again, and found it was

A Bear without a Head. “Poor thing,” he said, “poor silly thing!

It’s waiting to be fed!”

—Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, 1889

One morning in the summer of 2004, right around the same time the Free Town Project got rolling, Doughnut Lady fed the animals their usual early morning fare of grain, dog food, sugar water, cat food, and, naturally, a box of doughnuts (purchased from the local Market Basket). Then she and her husband went to see a man about a cow.

After moving to Grafton in search of freedom, the couple had carved out a large, landscaped yard with a vegetable patch and apple trees. They bought two cows, which Doughnut Lady named Buttercup and Princess. When Princess died, Buttercup was bereft.

The following day, Doughnut Lady found Buttercup alone, crying.

Buttercup was also crying the next day.

And the next. And the one after that.

As the days passed into weeks, it seemed that Buttercup’s grief would never end. Doughnut Lady was distraught.

Nearly a month after Princess died, Doughnut Lady was reading the local newspaper when she came across an article that got her thinking. The article was about a man across the Connecticut River—in Corinth, Vermont—who was having trouble caring for a cow.

The details were sparse, but it appeared that the man, Chris Weathersbee, had allowed one of his steers to die of starvation. The animal’s brother, Monty, was not doing well.

The thought of the starving steer galvanized Doughnut Lady into action. She called Weathersbee, and soon their voices were intermingling on the phone line—hers kindly, his gruff with suspicion.

“I’d like to take your steer,” said Doughnut Lady.

Weathersbee did not embrace the idea as quickly as she might have hoped.

“I don’t know about you,” he said. After the newspaper article, he was being hammered in the court of public opinion and was unsure of where she stood.

Doughnut Lady knew what to say.

“I have a cow that’s lonely.”

There was a brief silence, as spirits considered the possibility of kindredness.

“I might lease him to you,” allowed Weathersbee. They arranged for her to come see Monty, and he hung up the phone. To transport the cow across state lines, Doughnut Lady needed a certificate from a veterinarian, but none would agree to meet her at Weathersbee’s farm. When she and her husband headed to his property, they didn’t know what to expect.

Weathersbee, then in his sixties, was the British-born son of Mary Lee Settle, an actress–turned–respected historical novelist. She had purchased the property in Corinth; when Weathersbee moved there in 1997, it had just three goats on it.

He began to think of the twenty-nine-acre farm as a goat sanctuary, one that would run in accordance with his Buddhist beliefs. He started taking in stray Nubians and Cashmeres; because he thought it inhumane to isolate, castrate, or slaughter his bleating wards, they were free to breed with one another, a freedom of which the goats took full advantage.

Within four years, in 2001, the property was home to 252 goats, and Weathersbee—by then widely known in the community as Goat Man—was devoting most of his days to their care.

By the time Doughnut Lady and her husband pulled into the messy, muddy driveway of the once-proud farmhouse, Weathersbee had been completely overwhelmed by his charges. No one answered their calls of greeting or their knocks on the door.

And so, like a modern-day Goldilocks of a certain age, Doughnut Lady cautiously eased herself inside, onto footing that was strangely, organically, uneven.

They saw no one. Well, no people.

The previous winter, Goat Man had become concerned about the ability of his flock’s newborn goats to survive an unusually intense cold snap. So he moved the babies into the house. Ditto their nursing mothers. Ditto the oldest goats. Ditto the sick and the frail. In all, his extended goat slumber party included seventy goats, all allowed to stay inside the house until the cold snap passed.

But, as Doughnut Lady saw, and as other visitors would also eventually describe the scene, when the cold snap passed, Goat Man never evicted them.

Just inside the front door, goats milled aimlessly around the house, into and out of the kitchen, in small circles in the living room, up and down the stairs. Chickens foraged on the kitchen counter. In the living room, a goat stood on a wing chair overlooking a sleeping bag on the floor, where Goat Man reportedly slept while restless goats stepped onto and off of him all night.

Doughnut Lady saw that the uneven footing was from the layers of hay and goat shit that Goat Man had allowed to accumulate on the floor in such thickness that one’s head nearly bumped the ceiling. She and her husband backed out of the kitchen and entered the barn, still looking for their mysterious host, whose absence was becoming a bit unsettling.

If the house looked like a horror movie trailer, the barn was the full feature. It was as if some elder Cthulu god had been handed a wooden, barn-sized bowl of sacrificial chevre and cast it down, disgusted at the enormous mass of shit and dead goats mixed in with the living.

When she later described the number of goat corpses she’d seen, Doughnut Lady was characteristically diplomatic.

“He was trying, you know,” she said kindly. “He had a problem.”

When Goat Man eventually materialized, Doughnut Lady convinced him to surrender Monty to her. She drove the emaciated cow to a veterinarian and then headed home.

It was, perhaps, one of the last truly happy resolutions for an animal on Goat Man’s farm. Animal rights activists, neighbors, state officials—none of them had Doughnut Lady’s knack for getting Goat Man to part with his wards peacefully. Authorities suggested that, if he didn’t care for the animals better, they might be seized.

“I said, ‘I will resist you by every means at my disposal,’” Goat Man told Goat World magazine. “If the sheriff comes, you’ll have to shoot me.”

The final straw came a couple of weeks before Christmas of 2004, when someone—possibly an irate neighbor—shot one of the goats in the face and left the body in Goat Man’s front yard.

Just days later, Goat Man, who was still facing enforcement actions on animal cruelty charges, loaded up the seats of his small car with as many goats as it would carry and fled. He apparently landed in Ohio and began the whole goaty cycle over, because the following year he fled that state in similar circumstances, leaving the authorities behind him to discover 220 live goats and 80 dead goats.

Police, following a trail of dead goats that spanned four states, finally caught up with Goat Man in West Virginia. When he was arrested, he had sixteen goats in his possession (including one in the freezer). Stripped goatless, he soon disappeared from the public eye.

Without any knowledge of the dark days that awaited Goat Man, Doughnut Lady and her husband drove home, reflecting on a man who had seemed somewhat out of synch with reality.

Anyway, Doughnut Lady was anticipating the happy moment when she could introduce Monty to her bereaved Buttercup. She sure hoped Monty would get along with her bears.

Hmmm.

Her bears.

IT’S HARD TO imagine what it would have been like for Monty the cow, that moment when he stepped off the trailer to behold Doughnut Lady’s woodland home for the first time. His past had been dominated by the darkness of Goat Man’s chaotic, shit-strewn farmstead, where his brother had literally starved to death.

Now he stood on a bright hillside, birdsong washing over a long, sloping pasture where every detail spoke of care, and love, and order. A beautiful house towered over meticulously kept flowerbeds and fruiting apple trees. The tufted meadow was lush and neat, and Doughnut Lady’s tone was warm and soothing.

Feeders overflowing with sunflower seeds were aswarm with chirping chickadees and juncos, while deer and wild turkeys regularly ventured out of the woods to nibble at fallen apples or landscaped greens.

Instead of legions of bleating, half-starved goats, Monty’s companions would now be a few amiable dogs and cats—and there was the lovely Buttercup, fat with grain and sweet clover, utterly content to chew her cud while shading herself from the summer heat.

One might expect that after being delivered from goat hell into this bovine paradise, Monty would kick up his heels and frolic on the soft grass beneath his hooves. Instead, he lay down, touched his big horns to the ground, and rolled his eyes back in his head.

It was hard to say what ailed him. Had his rough living sickened him to the point where he just couldn’t keep steady on his feet? Was it a kind of bovine Stockholm syndrome, making him pine for Goat Man? Or was he, perhaps, distraught that the idyllic surroundings were saturated by a heavy, invisible pall of bear scent?

Doughnut Lady didn’t know. But the depths of his despair were clear.

“He wanted to die,” she said.

Knowing that the life of a downed cow is always in peril, Doughnut Lady pleaded with him to take to his feet. But Monty wouldn’t listen.

So she went and fetched a handcart, then wedged the edge beneath the cow as if he were a refrigerator to be moved. But still, Monty wouldn’t listen.

Finally, Doughnut Lady called a friend with livestock experience for help. Could it be bloat, the man asked?

Doughnut Lady didn’t know.

When her friend arrived, he approached Monty with a knife in his hand, wondering again whether it was bloat. If it was bloat, he said, he could cut into Monty’s side to relieve the gas pressure. Confronted with both cart and knife, Monty finally listened. Making the wise decision (the one that left his hide intact), he rose on unsteady legs.

“He was beautiful,” Doughnut Lady said. She didn’t even mind that he quarreled with Buttercup to the extent that she had to keep them separated. The important thing was that he would live.

Monty wasn’t the only one who felt apprehensive about Doughnut Lady’s carefully cultivated property. Dianne Burrington (as the daughter of June Burrington, she had grown up in the schoolhouse that was purchased by the Babiarzes) expressed a similar sentiment.

Burrington was as leery of the property as Monty. The problem was the bears.

In Grafton, some residents work hard to discourage bears from entering their property by getting fierce dogs and putting up electric fences. Burrington, who kept up her mother’s sheep farming tradition, used a tractor to bury her dead animals deep in the ground. When the ground froze and she could no longer dig such graves, she drove the carcasses up an old county road to dump them around the back side of a rugged outcropping known as Aaron’s Ledge, where the bears were thick as trees.

Burrington told me that, when she drove by Doughnut Lady’s home one day, she looked down the sloping pasture to the rear of the house.

“All I could see was brown. I said, ‘Jesus!’” Burrington tried, and failed, to count the animals she saw milling around. “I don’t know how many bear there was, but there was a lot of bear down there.”

The reaction wouldn’t have surprised Doughnut Lady. She understood that most people are afraid of bears. She used to be afraid of bears too.