Nester the goat: The greatest apple-powered barnyard warfare animal

Goats are the greatest animals.

Before moving to rural Alberta for a couple of years, I grew up next to Beacon Hill Park in Victoria. By age five, I could imitate the resident peacocks well, but peacocks are not the point.

Goats are.

Beacon Hill Park had goats, too. But I was headed to rural Alberta because I was turning into a wild teenager. My father felt it was his turn to send one of his offspring back after receiving three of his sisters’ teenagers, my crazy cousins.

Goats are the greatest because they eat the grass off your roof, baby goats jump on your shoulders and play with your hair, and the bleating is out of this world fun.

Nester the goat was a friend of mine. He knew me by my bleat, recognized my face, and would canter over to me with tongue out and his short six-inch tail flicking about.

His brown and white fur always contained bits of hay, the occasional spider web, or another goat’s dried poo.

Nester could burp like a human at volumes that should have put him into the Guinness Book of World Records. I taught him to burp on command, but he always needed food to have the world-record-level belches. Apples. He did apples.

I liked seeing Nester after school, because school could be torture, especially with Mr. Parkinson teaching. I was an okay student, but easily distracted, and Parkinson was a monotone metronome clicking at 50 beats a minute. A cadence that could put the Tasmanian Devil to sleep.

Anyway, Nester considered every day the greatest day in the history of goats.

His giant green eyes measured me with the vacant, nobody-is-home stare, much like a llama or a distant Bovidae relative.

I would hold out a handful of Granny Smith apple slices, and Nester would gobble them right up, turn and kick several times in the air and trot off bleating and burping.

Over the course of the summer, I prompted Nester with good behaviour by giving him watermelon or apples. He loved apples so much, he would easily take instruction and follow through on whatever trick I wanted him to perform, like jumping in circles, rolling over quite awkwardly, kicking another goat or just bleating really loud. I soon discovered that Nester loved burping after appletime. Loud. Almost violent, like he forced it and blew the burp through a cranked-up PA system.

Mr. Parkinson was my Grade 8 science teacher. He was the most uninspiring presenter in the history of man. He was so relentlessly boring that he was practically provoking a classroom uprising. Mr. Parkinson’s hair was parted with such geometric precision that it looked like Highway 1 crossing Saskatchewan.

Anyway, Nester would stare at me blankly, like he was expecting something.

Unlike my cousin’s turkeys, one of which smoked cigarettes, drank beer and fell off hay bales, Nester didn’t need vices. He ran entirely on apples and enthusiasm.

We would fall about laughing, it was so much fun.

“BAAAA,” right into the ear hole.

One time, Mr. Parkinson showed up to speak to the family about my behaviour in class. He intended to be kind, thoughtful and provide advice, but he was still going to out me as a teenager who was disruptive and fought too often.

Parkinson began talking to my guardian in gentle tones about how I was instigating trouble, speaking out of turn, and fighting.

Sensing trouble from Parkinson, I gathered a bucket of apples and cut them up. I clambered through the fencing to the goat corral and cleared my throat. Nester trotted out as exuberant as ever and tried to headbutt me a couple of times; he was so excited.

He would headbutt me, then stand there looking up. I think he was a surveillance goat in disguise. If so, I was in big trouble. I was about to make trouble anyway.

I put the bucket down and let Nester begin eating the giant cache of apples that I had cut up. While he ate, I massaged his stomach, the one that produces burps of epic proportions. The further Nester got into the bucket of apples, the more bloated and harder his stomach became. Soon, my arms were burning.

Parkinson stood there, held onto the fence, and raised his shoulders as if he were being hit by falling debris.

The burp seemed to last twenty seconds. Long enough for wet apple shrapnel and a fine mist to begin coating Parkinson’s ear.

Soon, he was as wet as a spring frog and covered in sauce.

Nester turned around, lifted his tail, and spewed enough brown gravy at Parkinson to cover him from the knee down to his Doc Martens. Nester trotted off as if in a dancing mood and began to kick about in circles, which I swear was him laughing aloud.

Parkinson escaped, short one Doc Marten.

On Monday, at school, I enjoyed the easiest science class I had ever had.

When I arrived home, I gathered the bucket, tossed in a few apples and watermelon and summoned Nester with a couple of click-clicks. Nester trots over, spies the bucket and gets the zoomies. He kicked up in circles, bleated spastically and headbutted everyone in sight.

Neither could catch my attention, never mind hold it.

When I hear the sheep bleat, mid-run, where I am daydreaming, it is a soothing sound. Lately, when I pass the goat farm, the silent morning air is often broken by the staccato burst of a loud goat bleat. Every time, I am startled out of my stupor and look up to see a goat perched on a wooden block, staring back at me, bleating like an old man emerging from the bar, “Baaaaaaa.”

I laugh. I can’t help myself. I bleat back.

It’s my way of saying hello to my old friend, Nester. Saying hello to his blank stare, dancing kicks, his loyalty, all of it. I miss that damned goat.

And if there’s any justice in the universe, I’ll come back as a carefree, apple‑powered barnyard lunatic, specked in cedar chips and cow dung, living exactly the way Nester did: loud, happy, and utterly unbothered.