I got to get up close and personal with a young Grey Fox today.

A fire crew was clearing weeds near one of our vacant buildings, and they looked in a window and saw this guy. Foxes in this building aren’t that unusual, but the door to his room was shut. He must have fallen in from the ceiling. Grey Fox are excellent climbers, and they sometimes use trees to get all the way to the roof of this three-story building. One of the roof access doors in broken, so they get inside and roam around.

When I got there with the snare, I slipped into the room. He hadn’t been trapped for too long, as his eyes were bright and shiny, but long enough to eat the buddy who’d been in there with him. Who knows what that one died of – the fall maybe? It hadn’t been long enough for the dead one to smell too bad either, so the live one wasn’t totally suffering.

He was curled up in a ball watching me with his beady little eyes, trying his best to appear invisible in a completely empty room with no hiding places. He looked young to me, with slight big paws. I know there’s often a litter near this building, and I suspect both foxes were this year’s spawn.

I moved slowly and slipped the noose of the snare over his head. Like a flash, he was through it. I almost caught him by the hips but I wasn’t fast enough to tighten it. He sped around the room a few times, climbing sheer walls at least as high as my head trying to get away from me.

In only a couple of minutes though, he’d settled back down in his corner. He’d been in there long enough to be a little short of energy. I moved ever so slowly and got the noose near him. He bit at it and growled, and yipped a little, but another try got it over his head.

As soon as I tightened it, he went limp. I think he was probably young enough to remember momma carrying him by the scruff, and he didn’t fight at all once I had a hold of him. I slid him out the door and out the back door of the building, which was right there. He held still while I fiddled with the faulty release spring on the snare, but once I had it loose, he was off like a shot.

A little disoriented, the last time I saw him he was headed right back to the corner of the building. I sure hope there’s a run there and he wasn’t just going back up to the roof.

I picked up what was left of the dead one and took it out of the building so it didn’t stink up the place too bad. I hid it in a hot, sunshiny area hoping that I can come back in a few months and pick up a relatively clean skull, which seemed to be intact. But if the local scavengers get it before I do, so be it. I did my part for the live one at least.

Poor Ringo was bounced around a lot in his life. My friend Big Jeff bought him when he was already grown. He had papers (which don’t mean much to Border Collie people) and Jeff was hoping to breed him to his female dog. She never took, but Ringo was his buddy for a few years.

When Jeff went to Iraq, I dogsat for him for almost a year. Angus and I both got pretty attached to Ringo, and when Jeff came home and picked him up, there was a dog-shaped hole in our lives. Jeff must have felt sorry for me, because he brought him back to be my dog.

Angus and Ringo became a fixture in my truck; I used to bring them both to work with me and take them for a run almost every day. Ringo was an odd dog, terrified of cameras and guns. He was very friendly but didn’t have an ounce of ball drive in him, unusual for a Border Collie. He was great with the kids and left the livestock alone.

But I’d been seeing a red spot on his eye. It would come and go, and I thought he was scratching it on something. Last week both eyes were so red that he was blind. He was feeling around for obstacles with his front feet and moving like he was sore. I took him in today, telling myself that if it was just a weird thing, he could live out his blind life at the house that he knows. But I wasn’t willing to put him through too much pain.

The vet’s initial thought was that it was a poisoning. He was bleeding into his eyes and his gums were white. He was acting like he had internal pain too. An early catch of poisoning is curable, but this has been going on for a while. Treating this would be expensive and iffy, and I just don’t have the money right now to throw at something that may or may not work. I’ve lost a dog to poisoning before, when I should have let him go sooner, and it’s not a pleasant death.

So I said goodbye at the vet’s office and let Ringo go for the last time. Angus will miss him and so will I. I had him for three and a half years. He was a good dog that had too hard of a life.

The last time I had a goat, it was at my house in town. He was a fun pet, but not really appropriate for town. The landlady would not have approved of a house-goat, although Elvis thought otherwise. After finding him in the living room for the third time, I finally cobbled together a fix to keep him from eating the sliding door screen. But then when I had to put down his doggie buddy, he got obnoxious. He hollered all day and bothered the neighbors, although how they could hear him over the yapping shit of a dog behind us, I’ll never know.

So I sent him off to live at a dairy with some other Pygmies. He was happy and I was happy.

Enter an acre and some other livestock. Now, I intend to eat this livestock; they are not pets. OK, maybe some of the chickens sort of are, but definitely not the sheep.

And we were offered a bummer goat from a dairyman my mother-in-law knows. I could see where this was going. I did not want to bottle feed another baby. I did not want to have my garden destroyed when a goat broke into it. I did not want to hear goaty shrieking when I slaughtered the sheep. Goats might be fun, but they’re also rather naughty. And it’s one more thing to have to feed when we’re gone.

So we waffled for a while. Junior wanted a goat “for the kids.” Sure, the kids who are collectively here half the time? Guess who would have to take care of the goat? Then the in-laws were going to take it. Fine by me, really. But then I got talked into it, and last weekend we went to pick up the (fortunately weaned) baby goat.

His name is Calvin, so I guess we’re not going to eat him. He looooves me. Clung to me as much as a little monkey of a goat can cling when we picked him up, but then, he’d just been castrated and didn’t feel so hot, and I probably most resemble the woman who was feeding him. Now he follows me around the yard and hollers if I get out of sight, but he settles down when I’ve been gone a little. He’s only broken into the garden once, and the kids caught that pretty quickly.

So I guess I like the little bugger.

We’ve got what’s essentially another animal pen in the far back, besides the garden and the two we’re using. It’s open to the concrete behind the shop and is more a utility area than anything else. The garbage cans are back there, and the dogs, and there’s a weedlot growing too.

So I’ve been letting the sheep out there to take care of the weeds. I can stop worrying about the collies harassing the sheep. The stupid collie is scared of them and hides in his dog house all day. The smart one is now their friend. He’s not much good for herding from the back, but they’ll follow him anywhere. It is a little alarming to go put the trash cans away and have not two faces run to greet you, but four. The woolly ones are always surprised that I’m a person and run away again, but then, they’re much dumber than even a stupid Border Collie.

So it was getting to be dusk tonight; time to round up the critters. I went out to feed them to bribe them back into their own pen, but they didn’t come. I could see them, so I didn’t know what was up with that. Until I looked a little closer: either they themselves or Angus had herded the both of them into the dog kennel on the concrete and, get this, then managed to shut the door. They didn’t get it latched of course; not even the smartest collie has thumbs. But there the two raving morons were, having pulled every last bit of straw out of the kennel’s dog house, standing there looking at me like, “What?”

So I let them out and they raced on over to where dinner was, only to be bamboozled by a cat. The housecat had got into their pen and was keeping them from the gate. Not very bright on anyone’s part there. Finally I got the gate shut behind them and all animals into the correct spots. The sheep, instead of eating, went for a sproing-fest, springing around their pens like really heavy deer, apparently for the sheer joy of it.

This aggravated the chickens in the next pen. Most of them sensibly ran for the coop when faced with two hundred pounds of sproinging idiocy, but not my main rooster. Not only did I finally figure out who’s crowing (the dominant one, as I’d suspected,) but I got to watch a rooster face down the enemy. Several times. While all the other chickens were in a flapping panic, the Lakenvelder was rushing the fence, puffing himself up and chasing the sheep. Who ran away. Each time.

I was laughing so hard at all of this that I was crying. Sheep a-bouncing, roosters charging, a horrified cat and a very smug collie makes for one entertaining evening.