The goat is found kneeling. Its legs are folded under it as though it lay down to rest, and the coat is dry and clean except for two punctures behind the jaw, each no wider than pencil lead. The pen at Ankerage Flat is latched and the wire is whole. Ignacio Salvatierra, who keeps forty head there, says the feed bucket was knocked on its side and the stock tank drunk down to mud. The dogs slept through it, which they never do. Nothing in the pen is torn. No smear stains the boards. The only smell is dust and, faintly, hot metal.
The tracks begin at the tank. Four splayed toes, a short fifth set back like a thumb, claws that print sharp even in hardpan. I pressed plaster casts of three and measured each with steel calipers across the widest spread of the toes: four and a quarter inches, within an eighth every time. The stride between prints, taken with a cloth tape, is thirty-one inches. That is a body no taller than a coyote with a leap no coyote makes. The trail runs to the fence, stops, and resumes on the far side of the arroyo with no prints between.
Two people at Kilderkin Wash have seen the animal itself under a lantern, one of them a boy sent out to check the troughs. It rises on its hind legs for a few seconds, then drops to all fours. The hide is gray-green and hairless, loose at the throat. A row of stiff quills runs from the crown to the base of the tail, each as long as a finger. The eyes are the orange of a stove coil and seem to hold the lantern light rather than throw it back. The left ear has a notch bitten out of the rim, old and clean at the edge. The forelimbs are long for the body, the hands narrow, the nails yellow.
Between visits it has changed in small ways. Three summers ago the notch was raw and pink at the margin. This year it is scarred over and bare, and the quills nearest the shoulders have worn to stubs. The losses have moved as well. My notebook from that year puts nearly all of them on Ankerage Flat; now they cluster around Kilderkin Wash, where the pens are older and the tanks larger. Families there have noticed that pens with a dry tank are passed over. They learned it by losing the ones with a full tank. Both places give the same instruction, and they give it flatly. Tip the troughs at dusk. Drain the stock tank. Leave no standing water within a hundred paces of the pen, and do not refill until the sun has been up an hour.
- Classification
- Hairless quadrupedal predator, cryptid
- Habitat
- Dry scrub, arroyos, ranch pens
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- Coyote-sized, 3.5 ft nose to tail base
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Arid borderland ranch country
- Binomial
- Caprisuga arroyensis
- Diet
- Goats and small livestock, standing water
- Temperament
- Wary, patient, avoids lantern light