AND THEN THERE WERE TWO

   My wife told me we had a problem. She said she was afraid something had happened to Trinity, the smallest of the triplet goats. We had seen her the night before outside with the rest of her family, right before bedtime. She was doing fine we thought. While I was at work she went looking for her and couldn't find her. She looked for over an hour.

   When I got home I went out and combed the property. To start of with , I couldn't find her either. I began to worry. Had she been getting enough to eat? We tried a bottle, but we couldn't get her to take hardly any. I started holding her sisters, one at a time when they started nursing, to make sure Trinity was getting her fair share.

   After 30 minutes of searching, I couldn't find her. Then I began looking for a body, or blood, or signs of a struggle. We have a good population of coyotes around the farm. But there was no signs. As the the sun started to go down, I had to stop and begin taking care of the rest of the animals for the night.

   I opened the barn up and was hauling feed out to the chickens when I saw her. She had laid down behind a sheet of plywood I had leaned up againist the barn. She was dead. I don't know how long she had been there, but I believe she must have passed sometime in the night. She was the runt of the litter, and I'm afraid she just couldn't stay strong enough to make it.

   You hate it when things like this happen, but it is the ugly side of life on a farm. I guess that's why the Lord lets animals have multiple babies. To ensure only the strongest survive. Little Trinity was sweet little girl while she was here. I took her down to the backside of the property and buried her near the giant white oak tree that I hope to be buried under one day.

   She will be missed!

Jim Cobb Coleman.