"About running away from home with all this bum shit needing cleaned up is what! Besides, what about Percy? He isn't draft age either."

"In a way he is. His square daddy keeps trying to force him to shape up. His teachers are always on his case – pledge allegiance, cut his hair, mind his tongue."

He paused. Percy's red head had ducked out of the bus and he was sneaking across our yard.

"There are some pegs that'll never fit a square hole. No matter how much force is used."

"We can change the hole," I reminded him.

"Can we?" M'kehla carefully put the egg back in the bucket and looked at me. "Can we really?"

This time it was me didn't answer. The issue was too long between us for short answering. During the decade of our friendship we had shared a vision, a cause if you will. We were comrades in that elite though somewhat nebulous campaign dedicated to the overthrow of thought control. We dreamed of actually changing the human mind to make way for a loftier consciousness. Only from this unclouded vantage, we maintained, could humanity finally rise out of its repetitious history of turds and turmoil and realize that mighty goal of One World. One World Well Fed, Treated Fair, At Peace, Turned On, and In Tune with the Universal Harmony of the Spheres and the Eternal Everchanging Dharma of… of… Anyway, One Wonderful World.

We never claimed to know precisely when the birth of this New Consciousness would take place, or what assortment of potions might be required to initiate contractions, but as to the birthplace we had always taken it for granted that this shining nativity would happen here, out of the ache of an American labor.

Europe was too stiff to bring it off, Africa too primitive, China too poor. And the Russians thought they had already accomplished it. But Canada? Canada had never even been considered, except recently, by deserters of the dream. I didn't like seeing them leave, these dreamers like brilliant and broken Heliotrope and old comrade M'kehla. These freckle-faced Huck Finns.

After his second helping of eggs Percy began to yawn and Betsy packed him away to share Quiston's bunk. M'kehla looked wider awake than ever. He finished his coffee and announced he was ready for action. I explained the day's plan. We had a new string of calves that needed branding and an old string of friends coming out to help. We would herd, corral, brand, barbecue, swim, and drink beer and end up at the fireworks display in Eugene at dusk.

"What we have to do now is prepare. We need to spread sawdust, buy beer, reinforce the corral to be sure it'll keep the calves in -"

"And the goat out," Betsy added.

M'kehla was already heading for the door. "Then let us so embark."

We got the tractor started and the auger hooked up and holes for new posts drilled. I set the posts while M'kehla tamped them fast with stones and gathered more stones from the ditches. I had to hustle to keep up. I was glad when the first visitor showed up to give me an excuse for a break.

It was my cousin Davy, the ex-boxer. His nose was red and his eyes even redder. I asked Davy what he was doing out this early. He said it was as a matter of fact this late; he had come because in the course of a long night's ramble he had acquired an item that he thought might interest me:

"For your Independence Day doo-dah."

He brought it from the back seat of his banged-up Falcon station wagon, a beautiful American flag trimmed with gold braid. It was a good twenty feet long. Davy claimed to have won it in a contest during the night. He didn't remember what kind of contest, but he recalled that the victory was decisive and glorious. I told him it was a great item; too bad I didn't have a pole. Davy turned slowly around until he spotted a small redwood that the frost had killed the winter after I planted it.

"How about yon pole?" he drawled, then pointed at the last unposted hole where M'kehla and I were working, "in hither hole." So the three of us felled and bucked the dead limbs off the redwood. Davy made a try at barking it with the draw knife but gave up after ten minutes. M'kehla and I deepened the augered hole by hand until it would support the height of our spar, and drug it over. We attached the hooks and pulleys and tilted the pole into the hole just as Frank Collin Dobbs and crew were arriving in his cutaway bus. In our hurry to get the flag aloft for their arrival we just tossed in dirt, promising to tamp it later. Dobbs got out just as I pulled the brilliant banner aloft. He and Davy snapped to a rigid salute. They launched into the Marine Hymn so far off key I was moved to join them.

M'kehla had chosen not to honor the ceremonies. He turned his back on the foolishness and was finishing our fencing task, reaching around the flagpole and hammering in the last section of wire.

This is when Killer made that piledriving sneak attack that started this story about verve and nerve, and the loss of it, and old friends, and strange beasts.

How came I with this awful goat? Much the same way the farm came by a lot of its animal population: the animals were donated by animal fanciers who had run out of space or patience. Our original peacocks had been abandoned by Krishnas whose ashram had been repossessed; the horses were from rock stars' girlfriends, adrift without permanent pastures. Donkeys without gold mines, sheep without shearers, parrots without perches – they had all found their various ways to the seeming stability of our farm.

Stewart, for instance, had simply come trotting in one day, a halfgrown pup eager to enlist. Varmint-Boy was living in our swamp in an old U.S. Army tent so he decided he would act as the induction officer. He whistled the pup into his tent and shot him up with a boot-camp dose of methadrine. For hours the new recruit drilled chasing birds and fetching sticks, until the shadow grew long and the drill instructor bored. The exhausted pup lay down to sleep but of course could only stare and ponder. Pondering is hard for a dog and not necessarily healthy, but Stewart survived (though he never lost that strung-out stare) to become the top dog. The Varmint was finally drummed off the place for this and other such crimes against innocence.

Killer came from much more conventional sectors. He was the mascot for our high school team, the Nebo Hill Billies. Our symbol is the charging goat. For ten seasons Killer was tied to the bench of the football team, where visiting teams tried to run over him. He was paraded across basketball courts where opposing symbols reared and teased at him. Terry-cloth bears and papier-mâché eagles. Enough to sour any animal.

The meaner he turned the more they came at him. The eye was put out by a baseball spike in a close play at home. The horn he lost during a Creswell homecoming game. A Creswell scatback was down after a hard hit on the punt return and the ambulance had driven across to get him. Killer had tugged at his tether when the flashing contraption drove onto the field. The fallen hero was lifted into the machine and the siren was started. This was more than Killer could endure. To the applause of the stands he snapped his dog chain and charged head-on into the ambulance. Fans that witnessed this famous charge spoke afterward of it with wonder and affection. "Not only knocked the headlight and turn signal clean off he then got tangled underneath in the front suspension; it was another half hour before they could get it all unloosed and towed off the field."

The wonder lasted but the affection fled with the goat's aromatic recovery. The vet said the roll beneath the ambulance had ruptured the little musk sacks on each side of the goat's anus – he could no longer turn the sacks on and off. Only leave them on. The vet said the only solution was neutering, cutting of the testosterone that stimulated the musk. The Nebo Hill Boosters thought it over and concluded that rather than have a ball-less billy for a mascot they would build one out of papier-mâché, and Killer was out of a job.