Late one night I levitated straight up from bed. I just heard a dying moose bellow. I thought
for a second and dropped back in bed. There’s no moose in WV. It was only Dreamer, our
yearling full blood Boer buck, sweet-talking his girls. Lee thrashed around and said, "Wha
szat?"
"Dreamer," I said.
Lee was asleep even before he said, "Oh."
The bellowing continued through the night, but it was only background music with the
neighbor’s barking dogs. They thought it was moose, too.
When it’s breeding time we divide the girls up and put them in different large pens with the
buck of our choice, not their choice. It always happens that some girls prefer the guy in the
other pen, not a bit happy with theirs. They’ll bawl around like a just weaned calf, only
louder, wanting their guy. They eventually get bred to the guy of our choice, but not after a
great deal of persuasion from him and sometimes a second heat cycle.
We keep the breeding bucks close by so I can check and write down the day they breed
certain does. One pen is on a hillside right below our bedroom window. We get to hear the
full range of a buck’s sweet-talking.
The moose bellow is an excellent one for snapping the eyelids open and finding yourself
almost out of the house to check on the animals. The continuous, "nanananana" is a favorite
of the bucks and the girls find it captivating. What I call the raspberry sets all the girls a
twitter.
The raspberry is the explosive blowing out of air through the mouth and sometimes nose that
last several seconds. They like to go up and blow spit all over the does’ faces. The does
respond by saying, "How sweet. Just for me? All this spit?"
But, the does have to be in the right mood for all this attention. One day Dreamer walked up
to a large 7/8 doe that came out of Oklahoma. Naturally her name is Okie. Okie is a very
opinionated doe. She was just standing, half dozing in the sun, dreamily chewing her cud.
Dreamer comes up and does a loud raspberry right under her left ear. She doesn’t even
dignify this with an answer and keeps on peacefully chewing her cud.
Thinking he needs more emphasis on his sweet-talking, he stands back and does a seductive,
"nananananan!" And to prove his seriousness, he strikes the ground hard with one foot. But,
in the process of striking the ground, he accidentally strikes her side.
Okie went into a frenzy. She was furious. How dare he strike her! This big doe weighed as
much as Dreamer, at least 250 lbs., and she started thumping him, working him over from
one end to the next. Running in circles to give him a complete thumping and all the time
bellowing, calling him all kinds of names.
Dreamer stood there and took that beating with a smirk on his face. His response would have
been, "I think she likes me." When she got tired, Okie went off in huff. Dreamer puffed
himself up and went to moose call the next good looking doe.
Now Texas Joe is only ten months old but he is instinctively a smooth talker. His raspberries
can be heard all up and down the valley. His "nananananas" are among the best, and the girls
think he’s cuter then a bug. He hasn’t got his moose call down yet. He seems a little shy
about it. The best he can do on that one is "uhooh-uhooh" in a soft-spoken Bing Crosby
croon, that just leaves the girls spell bound.
He walks around looking regal until he can’t help himself and let’s out a string of raspberries
to impress the girls. Spitting and raspberrying, his tongue sticking out as he works his
raspberries over time, spraying that spit everywhere, striking the ground (he saw Dreamer do
that), he proclaims to the world that there’s nothing like buck luving.
Connie Reynolds - Autumn Farm
