I'm Kidding?

In came the farm hands with a newborn kid goat, that they would have counted as dead except for the fact that it kept gasping every few seconds for air.  It was cold. The farm hands acted as if they just needed the final word to bury the poor thing.  The owner of the farm told them to go get some milk and let's see what we could do.

It didn't look good.  The heartbeat was faint and somewhere around sixty per minute. Normal for a full grown man. Near death for a mammal of three pounds. It looked comatose.  The body felt cold to the touch in a room that was 50 degrees.  I held this little kid next to the propane room heater and kept massaging it and praying that God would keep him alive.  I had to gently massage his throat to get him to swallow small amounts of milk.

There were other things that had to be done and it seemed like an exercise in futility to try to work to keep this little kid alive.  But he kept fighting.  He had a gaping wound on his rear leg more than a half of an inch.  One of the workers thought it might be because large rats that he'd seen might have attacked the kid early  on.

I managed to get home just as the sun was disappearing behind the mountains, ready to celebrate a special Shabbat with our new little friend.

I will post more on this in the morning.

UPDATE:  Unfortunately, little Chestnut got weaker through the night and would not take the milk that I had brought from the farm.  Twyla kept vigil from about 03:00.  We had him on a heating pad and did all we could, but it just wasn't meant to be.  He died shortly after 05:00.  Life is a fragile thing.