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Eleven below last night. Twin goats born yesterday afternoon. The first born froze to death. Or maybe she was a still born. Her mama is a new mother. Maybe she didn’t know to tend it proper. To lick it dry. To encourage her. Maybe her mama didn’t know what was happening to her, didn’t know what to do with this squishy thing that lay on the ground and the other one coming out of her. By the time we found her the one baby was dead and the other was trying to live. This morning another baby born, but it came head and leg first, the other leg bent backwards, jammed up inside the mama. The mama sat exhausted, defeated, for how long? Had this baby made its entrance in the early morning, while the night was ending, when the freezing temperatures were their harshest? The baby’s eyes are swollen, mouth clogged with dirt. It may make it.

I am sewing a quilt. Full of flowers and pinks. Tropical flamingos. Hope. Spring. It is the dead of winter with 4 months left to go. The baby runs around with the fabrics, tossing them over her head, laughing and tossing them again. I stitch rows of flowers and hope and warmth. My husband is in the barn coaxing the kids to life, nudging them to nurse, to stand, to snuggle their mamas. My baby rubs her eyes, she is tired, waking at dawn each morning to nurse. The sun’s rising is her greatest joy.

All news of cougars circles back to us. One killed down in the valley. Another killed in the tree while her two kittens looked on. Last night a particularly disturbing account from the foot of Miner’s Mountain. Around Christmas last month, a lady saw her out of town neighbor’s door to his airstream trailer open. She hopped over and shut it and went on her way.  When he came back in town he found a dead cougar in there. Dead from rat poison. The woman hadn’t looked in, did not know she was locking a lion to its death. We run into the trapper coming back from Miner’s Mountain. He was called for a cougar, but all he could track were two kittens, their mother’s tracks obscured. He had not the heart or mind to go off killing kittens that were troubling no one, just passing through.

The local guys are out shooting for sport. I find nothing sporting of treeing a mother with her young and shooting her. Perhaps if they were facing these beasts with knives and their wits I could condone such a confrontation. Lion blood is spilling all around us. We have escaped further losses so far, but the guard dog barks and circles most of the night, every night. We are being watched.

The cougar came a week before Christmas. It ate the small, jumpy churro. All the churros are small compared to the range sheep. This one was particularly timid and clung to her braver older sister- who the cougar ate 2 days later. Same corner of the corral. The little things were gleaning hay from the feeders late into evening, exposed during hunting time. Biddie’s body lay in a snare for a week waiting for the cougar to return. It returned, but it did not take the bait, it did not take anything but our false sense of security.

I did not want to call the trapper, to have the cougar hunted down with dogs, shot, safety restored to my barn yard. But seeing Biddie laying with her guts tumbling out in the same spot her sister died days before, I had to call. We had become a quick dinner stop for a lazy – or desperate- cougar. How desperate was this cougar? The tracker traced it up and down the hills and valleys, to a neighbor’s porch a few miles up the highway at the base of Boulder mountain. Yeah, they said, they’d seen it, sitting on their porch all evening while 50 guests drank and partied inside for the holidays. Not very timid, this cougar, who sat waiting for an easy snack to come teetering out.

The trapper is polite, gentle spoken. He comes every day. He leaves every day empty handed. At night the dogs bark. We look out the window, strain our eyes into the night. The moon is bright bouncing up and down on the snow. The dog is a large white dot on the snow. The cougar circles us but we do not see.

The postmistress says the boys from town killed a cougar in a tree. There were three cougars, they killed the big one. She doesn’t say it, but I know, it was a mama and her young.  Treed and scared, the mama shot dead in front of her young, taken off for trophy stuffing. The babes left to starve.

The trapper never gets our cougar. The cougar doesn’t get my husband, who walks nightly with his rifle around the perimeter, checking the baby goats are safe inside the corral. My husband cannot rest easy. We do not rest easy. Secretly, though, I am glad our cougar is not dead, no I am relieved, for now.

The baby goats arrive, two, then two more, then one, and on and on and on. The strong twins get frostbite on their ears. We knew better than to breed this early, birthing in December in snow. But the bucks got ahead of us and started this cycle before we could pen them. Now we have 20 babies running around, their mamas calling them as they slip in and out of the corral, jumping off the big rocks. Their legs are brand new. The sun warms them, sends them racing around together like a school of fish, turning and halting in unison. I resist taking notice of them individually, they will be gone in the fall. Some of the old girls will be gone in the fall. Our living depends on their dying. Right now they jump and play and kick their feet together, little creatures of pure joy. The baby laughs at them.

Halloween is here. My stubborn witch sleeps. The cows walk back and forth in the yard over. They are moving today to their feed lot for the winter. The neighbor pulled his trailer out for the season. My jade plant lies limp in its pot, I am a day too late to bring it inside. Winter is creeping down the mountain towards us. For now it is sunny.

The men are on the hunt. The moon is full, setting behind me. The sun already showing behind Miner’s mountain. Are there any deer left? Have the muzzle rifles scared them all off? Will we have meat for the winter?

The baby sleeps, she is busy growing teeth, whimpering in her sleep. She plunged head first off the bed hitting the ledge on the way. When I found her she was kneeled down gasping, flailing for something solid to pull herself up on. It is her habit to descend head first. Arms stretched out supporting her, lowering herself to the ground, then swinging her body around. She goes up and down steps this way. It is fearless, because until her fall she had no reason to fear. Every time she plunged she succeeded.

She climbed up the stairs, 6 of them, until she looked behind her. She let out a whimper as she realized that she had to go back down them. She has learned fear.

The dog got a rabbit this morning. He left it at the truck, an offering. The kitten rips into the flesh.