The Goat Who Wasn't Going to Make It

Beatrix Cramer pulled into a petrol station in Yunta, South Australia. The stop was meant to be brief—fuel, perhaps some lollies for the road, then onward to Broken Hill. The low fuel light had forced her hand; Yunta was not a place she had intended to linger.

Inside the service station, she overheard a conversation that changed the trajectory of her day.

Two men stood at the counter discussing a goat named Vincent. The animal belonged to one of them—a weathered man in a checked flannel shirt whose tone carried the flat resignation of someone who had already made peace with an unpleasant decision. His new dog didn't like the goat. Had been nipping at Vincent's legs, drawing blood. Nobody wanted an old goat, and he couldn't keep managing the conflict.

He was probably just going to shoot him.

The words landed with quiet finality. The woman behind the counter didn't flinch. The second man offered sympathy but no solutions. This was bush pragmatism, delivered without drama—a problem identified, a solution implied, the conversation moving on to dog food and liquorice bullets.

Beatrix paid for her fuel and stepped outside.

Vincent was in a cage on the back of a silver Toyota Land Cruiser, chewing methodically at his feed, entirely unaware of the sentence that had been passed on him. His dark eyes held no urgency, no fear. He was simply a goat, doing what goats do, waiting for whatever came next.

The rescue was not planned. There was no careful assessment of consequences, no weighing of logistics against compassion. Beatrix moved before the decision had fully formed—reversing her car, approaching the cage, working the latch with fingers that trembled only slightly.

Vincent was heavier than expected. His hooves struck the concrete with authority as he landed, and for a moment they stood in silent standoff—woman and goat, each assessing the other. Then he allowed himself to be guided into the backseat of her car, settling into the hay she had hastily gathered with the dignity of an animal who understood he had been given a second chance.

The hens came next.

They had gathered around her car like witnesses to a crime, their beady eyes fixed on her with an intensity that felt almost accusatory. Their clucking rose in volume and urgency, a chorus that seemed to carry a single message: what about us?

Beatrix had not planned to rescue chickens. But the door was already open, and the line between one impulsive act and the next had already blurred beyond recognition.

Six hens joined Vincent in the vehicle. The boot became a makeshift coop, hay scattered across surfaces never designed for livestock, the smell of feathers and earth mingling with the leather interior.

By the time Beatrix pulled back onto the Barrier Highway, she had acquired a goat, half a dozen chickens, and the certain knowledge that Paul was going to have questions she wasn't entirely prepared to answer.

The road to Broken Hill stretched ahead. Behind her, Yunta receded into the flat, ochre distance, taking with it Bill and his unspoken sentence and the conversation that had changed everything.

Vincent bleated once from the backseat—a sound that might have been gratitude, or complaint, or simply the noise a goat makes when his world has been unexpectedly rearranged.

Beatrix turned up the radio and kept driving.