Nobody in Espinazo leaves a goat in an open pen after the last dust of the evening has settled. Pens are roofed with thorn brush, and the brush is laid with the thorns pointing down. The practice is older than anyone's grandmother, and the reasons given for it differ from house to house. Three accounts follow, set side by side. Olinda Barrera, who keeps forty goats on the ridge above the Espinazo cistern, says the animal stands upright only when it is cornered, and otherwise runs low like a greyhound. She has seen it twice. Both times it was gray and nearly hairless, with a row of quills down the back that lifted when her dog barked. She found a nanny afterward with two neat punctures under the jaw and no other mark. The milk was gone from her too.
The second account is from Orestes Calda, a hide-tanner, who has no patience for the first. He says it is a coyote with mange and that the quills are scabs. He has skinned three such coyotes and sells the pelts cheap, since nobody wants them. He also says the animal sleeps through the hottest part of the day in dry culverts, curled with its nose under its tail, and that it yawns and scratches like any dog. This is the most ordinary thing anyone reports about it, and he reports it without interest.
The third comes from Ofelia, a girl of about twelve, who watched it from a loft window in Garrucha. She says it has eyes the red of a lit stove coil and that it hissed at the moon. She also says it never touched the chickens, only the goats. I cannot check her claim that it counted the goats before it chose one, and I do not repeat it as fact.
The accounts agree on small things. The punctures sit two fingers apart. The carcass is cold and light. A sulfur smell hangs on the fence wire for a day, and tracks show four toes with a long central claw. The tracks lead away to the dry creek bed and stop at the stones. The trade it has produced is the thorn-roofer. Three families in Espinazo do nothing else from September on, and each carries a bundle of pruned mesquite on a pole and charges by the pen. They are better paid than the schoolteacher. There is one exception to all of it. The widow Dessa Ruiz keeps her goats in an open yard with no roof, and has for thirty years. She has lost nothing. She says only that she leaves a pan of sour milk at the gate, and that the thing is welcome to it. I have not seen the pan emptied.
- Classification
- Blood-drinking scrub predator
- Habitat
- Dry ridges, culverts, goat country
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 3.5 ft long, 2 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Dry scrubland of the borderlands
- Binomial
- Canis sanguivorus
- Diet
- Goat blood and milk
- Temperament
- Wary, skulking, quick to bolt