The Four-Legged Sadist

Inspired by true events.

The numbers on the illuminated blue clock tell me it’s 3:13 in the morning.  Unbelievable.  The two white noise machines strategically placed on either side of my head still couldn’t drown out the scratching noise that’s coming from outside.  

He’s back.  

And this time he’s interfering with my sleep schedule in a really fucked up way.  11:13pm would have been fine.  Hell, even 5:13am would have been acceptable.  But this hour is seriously sadistic.  ‘How did he get out this time?’, I wonder as I clumsily search for my glasses on the nightstand. 

Hmm… Maybe I’m just imagining the sounds.  All that faint scratching and scraping is actually just in my head.  Maybe… hopefully, I’ve lost my mind.  Just as I’ve nearly convinced myself of undeniable insanity, there it is again.  The unforgiving scratching assures me that my mind is still quite intact.  

Maybe I should just get another white noise machine.

As I stumble around in the dark and manage to pull the oversized bathrobe over my shoulders, I begin to have doubts about what really happened last night.  I replay each step over and over in my head as I walk down the stairs in the dark.  The scratching hasn’t stopped for a single second since I rolled out of bed.

Around 11:00pm I went outside, closed the barn door with him still inside, locked it from the outside with the new padlock that just arrived from Amazon… didn’t I? ...and put a second cable knit chain around the gate to the pen, just in case.  I was confident that he would be locked in until the morning.  

Or did I imagine the part about the second chain?  No, no, no.  It really did happen, it had to have happened.  I begin to recall a joke I made to myself about Alcatraz as I walked back towards the house in the dark, satisfied with all the precautions that were taken.  Not to mention, I must’ve unlocked and relocked the padlock half a dozen times to make sure he was actually inside the barn before walking away.

I feel even more assured that my nightly routine actually took place when I see the key to the padlock sitting on the kitchen counter downstairs.  The scratching and scraping is reverberating in my head at this point.  He’s hard at work.

I disarm the alarm system and pull the headlamp over my messy bed hair.  This seems to make more sense than carrying the commercial grade spotlight that normally accompanies my late night… er, early morning adventures outside.  And I have a sneaking suspicion that both of my hands will be required to deal with whatever chaos is currently taking place outside.  Afterall, he weighs over 250 pounds.  

I turn on the headlamp and make my way towards the sliding glass door, just towards the back of the dining room.  Scratching fills the entire room, and at this point I swear it’s making the walls vibrate.  

There he is.  

The beam of light from the LED bulbs reflects off his eyes and turns them into a menacing,  glowing green.

How appropriate.  

He startles at my sudden arrival at the back door and stares straight through the glass.  Our faces are mere inches from one another, separated only by the double pane.  He looks at me, and I look right back at him, our eyes locked.  His blank expression gives me the impression that he’s challenging me.  

Fuck this.

It’s 3:17am and Thomas the Goat is casually standing on the back deck.  Just hanging out like it’s perfectly normal.  Like he wants me to bring him a cold beer and ask him about his day.  He’s been caught red-handed yet again, but clearly doesn’t give a damn.   For a second I think he may even be smiling.

How many times has it been now?  Every day (and now every night) he’s here.  Every goddamn time he’s just chewing and scratching at the side of the house.  Gnawing on the thick cedar planks that make up the exterior walls of my country home.  Scraping his sharp bottom teeth against the exposed wood.  It’s complete carnage.

Where was once a nice earthy gray-ish brown paint is now a gargantuan, gaping display of eroded scrap wood. It used to be so beautiful and welcoming here, so rustic and peaceful.

Now it’s a construction zone for a four-legged sadist.  Maybe I should get him a hard hat.

You see, Thomas the Goat has been eating the side of my house for months now.  I can’t stop him.  Honestly, I can’t.  

The first couple of times I caught him sniffing around the back door and taking a few nibbles here and there, I sprayed him with a garden hose.  He came back, soaking wet and enraged, hungry for revenge.  After that I began yelling his name in a deep, freakish tone, hoping that the sound alone would frighten and deter him.  It only encouraged him to further defy me and he started butting the side of the house.  I even tried coating the side of the house with a vinegar and cayenne pepper solution that I read about online.  He enjoyed the taste.

Furthermore, I installed a chain… and then two chains... on the gate to the pen because he learned how to open it using those ferocious fangs.  He then resorted to jumping over the electric fence.  I increased the voltage.

I tried locking him inside the barn at night.  He simply busted through the door and then jumped over the electric fence.  

I tried to tie him up inside the barn.  He chewed through the rope, busted through the [new] door of the barn, and jumped over the now super-charged electric fence, and made his way back to his command center where he proceeded to wreak havoc.

I can’t stop him.  He’s simply, utterly unstoppable.  

Let’s be honest here - Thomas the Goat is not eating the house because he’s hungry.  He’s eating the house because he has seen the comforts of inside the house. He sees that there is a life beyond the confines of the pen, and he wants so very badly to be a part of it.  

He peers through the back sliding door and he can see everything that I’m doing.  Not just see - it appears as though he’s watching me.  Observing my every move.   He watches me read.  He watches me watch movies.  He watches me work from my laptop during the day.  He watches me play with the cats.  He watches me cook dinner.  He watches me watch him.  

The barn isn’t good enough for him, not anymore.  I truly believe that he feels himself worthy of a single family home.  My home.  No hay or cedar chips for bedding anymore - he wants his own bed, at the very least a futon.  And eventually my California King.  

It all started months ago when I let him out of the pen for our daily walk down to the mailbox and back.  The half a mile round trip journey usually ends up being an entire hour’s worth of activities for Thomas the Goat.  There’s a particular spot on the gravel driveway where he loves to jump and fling himself forward and upward, sideways, to the left, and then to the right.  He darts all the way to the runoff from the creek where he takes a sip of water.  His beard gets wet and he licks his lips in a failed attempt to dry it.  Then he’ll take a shit or three, scratch his rotund belly with his hind feet, and forge ahead.  He always stops at the same thornbush, and at the same patch of wild garlic.  And finally, at the same raspberry bush which he has undoubtedly permanently destroyed.  Once we begin to cross the bridge, the hair on the back of his neck stands straight up and he starts rearing, jumping, and bucking wildly.  I think he must feel dominant on the bridge.  His bridge.

Soon, we reach the mailbox and like every other time, I reach inside, grab whatever garbage they’ve wasted trees on, and start walking back towards the house.  And, like always, Thomas the Goat tries to eat the mail.  If I’m feeling generous, I let him nibble on the local town’s monthly newsletter.  It’s all nonsense anyway and a little bit of ink and paper isn’t going to hurt him.  

Once we reach the yard it’s time for Thomas the Goat to go back inside the pen.  That’s where he belongs.  

Until it wasn’t anymore.  

He didn’t go back inside the pen.  He just stared at me defiantly, refusing to budge.  

I tried pulling him by the horns, pushing him from behind, luring him with treats (graham crackers, his favorite), but nothing worked.  He stared at me with those big black eyes like I was the crazy one.  

So I decided to leave him on the back deck overnight.

‘You’ll be begging for the safety of your pen when it turns dark and the forest predators come out to get you!’, I unconvincingly threatened.  He didn’t believe me, though.  I didn’t even believe myself.  

No forest predator would be brazen enough to take on Thomas the Goat.

I stormed into the house, slammed the sliding glass door behind me and watched him from inside.  Looking back at it, I may have made a few unsightly faces at him through the glass.  

He grazed around the lawn for awhile (thank god, because I definitely don’t mow it), ate some leaves from the trees, watched a plane fly overhead, took a few shits, and finally settled down in a deceivingly small curled-up ball just outside the door.  And that’s where he stayed all night.

The next morning, Thomas the Goat was still outside, of course.  He hadn’t gone anywhere, and no forest predators came around.  After a breakfast of grain, corn, and some celery stalks I accidentally left out the night before, he willingly went back into the pen without any struggle at all.  No refusal, no defiance, he just walked right back inside.   

Seemingly satisfied and ready to relax for the rest of the day, Thomas the Goat settled down in his favorite spot inside the pen and took a dirt bath.  

What a good boy.

Just as I was making my way back inside the house, my hand just about to grasp the door handle is when I saw it.  

Just to the right of the sliding door was a very small, but very noticeable scratch in the paint of the side of the house.  Maybe two or three inches in height and certainly no more than half an inch wide.  The paint had clearly been eaten away, and the wood underneath had been taste-tested as well.  They say goats eat anything and everything, right?  Maybe he just got bored or perhaps even agitated that he had to sleep on the back deck.  Maybe he just wanted to keep himself busy by gnawing on the wood siding.  Anyway, it wasn’t too noticeable and it would be an easy repair, I thought.  

‘Easy repair’.  That was months ago.

Let’s fast forward back to 3:17am.  That three inch scratch is now three feet in height, and at least that many feet in width.  The most distressing and concerning fact is that it’s no less than six inches deep.  

HOW.

Well, in all honesty, I know how.  Each time I tried to repair the small indentations in the wood and repaint them, Thomas the Goat chewed twice as hard, and three times as fast.  His appetite for destruction increased daily.  The more malicious he became, the weaker I felt.  It became so completely, interminably unmanageable.  I gave up.  

There was nothing else I could do.

Much to my chagrin, exterminating Thomas the Goat simply wasn’t an option.  And giving him to some other unlucky fool seemed to be an insult to humanity.  So, I resigned to living with my soft heart, my soon-to-be shack in the woods, and the four-legged sadist who wanted so badly to be inside.  

I stepped out into the night and examined the massacre that my house was quickly becoming.  The six inch-deep gaping hole was losing its resilience - it began to give whenever I gently pressed against it.  I could have easily kicked my way through and been inside the dining room in seconds.  Imagine the electric bill in the winter and summer!

Thomas the Goat observed my reaction from a safe distance, and contentedly began chewing his cud.  I turned to face him, the headlamp once again casting an eerie glow from his eyes, and realized that I had lost.  Sighing, I walked towards the gate of the pen with Thomas the Goat following closely behind.  I opened the gate and led him inside without struggle.  As I turned to go back towards the house, I didn’t even bother closing the gate with the chains this time.  The damage had already been done, and I had given up.

Given the size of the hole, I’d say Thomas the Goat was working rather diligently for a few hours throughout the night.  Surely he wanted to rest for a while.  Maybe even I could get a few more hours of sleep before it was time to wake up and feed him.

It’s  3:27am when I crawl back into bed.  Restless, my mind begins spiraling about how in the world I can possibly repair this much damage.  Not to mention in a way that won’t be immediately destroyed again.  

‘Maybe I could build one of those container homes’, I thought as I tossed and turned.  ‘Maybe I could sell the house as-is and live in a tiny home on an island in the middle of the ocean’... ‘Maybe I could build a bomb shelter on Mars.’  

But, where would Thomas the Goat live?  

As I finally began to drift off into what would undoubtedly be a fretful sleep, I knew that I was stuck with him no matter where I went, no matter what I did.  The four-legged sadist still had a few more good years left in him, and my home and I were at the complete mercy of them.

I had been sleeping for less than two hours when I awoke suddenly to the sound of my bedroom door creaking open.  

Hadn’t I shut it completely?  And even locked it?  No, I didn’t lock it.  I thought I did, I usually do.  But I was too distracted from the cavernous exposure in my house to think of anything else.

I laid silent and still in the darkness, my mind not yet fully alert.  Complete silence for the next few minutes convinces me that I must’ve been imagining things.  I turn onto my side and shut my eyes again, this time hoping for at least just one more hour before the day begins.

Less than a minute later, there it is again.  

The creaking of the bedroom door is definitely real, and it is most definitely opening.  

This time it’s followed by the click clack of hooves against the wooden floorboards.  One, two, three, four.

No.  No.  NO.  This is not happening.  

Too stunned to move, I lie completely still in hopes that it… that he ... just goes away.  

Then I sense it - that ominous feeling you get when another presence is nearby.  I held my breath, shut my eyes, clench my jaws, and grip the sheets as tightly as possible.  The sound of the hooves was coming closer to the bed.  Gradually becoming louder and louder.  

Too afraid to budge, to make a single noise or motion, I was as still as I’d ever been in my entire life. 

That’s when I felt it.  

Warm breath hitting my face, causing the hair in front of my eyes to rise and fall.  In, and out.  My hair goes up, and down.  Repeat.  

Carefully, I opened an eye.  Just one.

When it finally adjusted to the darkness of the room, I saw all I needed to see.  

A set of horns, and those black eyes just staring right back at me.