Most hermits, I find, are wont to relieve their solitude by declaiming poetry, and I was no exception to the rule. I knew all of Thanatopsis and most of The Ancient Mariner. When I recited these, Jagg always listened with an air of polite interest. One morning, however, as I built my fire, I chanced to repeat Cowper’s beautiful lines beginning: “O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!”
Immediately my attention was attracted by Jagg. He tore about madly, giving every evidence of joy, bleating loudly, and furiously wagging his stub of a tail. He stood on his head, rising at once to the perpendicular, then as swiftly reversed. Something happened then which I could not explain, and I rubbed my eyes in wonder. A moment before he had been there and now he was nowhere in sight. I never learned how he did it, for he moved too rapidly for the eye to follow, but, according to my theory, he put his four feet together and with a single powerful muscular effort shot himself into space, alighting perhaps a quarter of a mile distant, and returning when he pleased. This gave him his sub-title in my records: “The Skootaway Goat.”
At first I was overjoyed to have the faithful animal with me, but, by insensible degrees, his companionship began to pall. He went with me once to the Porcupine race, but speedily made both of us unpopular. Again, I locked him into the cabin, but no sooner had I returned than I regretted it. He ate one of my note-books and thereby many priceless observations are lost to the world.
I bought a rope and tied him to a tree, but he joined me at Porcupine Hill with evident satisfaction at the reunion. I got a long chain from the village and this foiled him only once. He filed it apart with tooth and horn and acquired so insatiable an appetite for cold metal that he even hunted my pockets at night for coins. Canned goods were eaten, tin and all, as soon as I brought them home. I began to perceive, dimly, that I must part with Jagg, and ultimately regarded the notion as a relief measure passed by an overwhelming majority.
Yet ways and means were lacking, and also, possibly, the initiative. He had grown into a very handsome animal by this time, and I was so accustomed to him that the woods had an unfriendly, alien smell when I fared forth alone. I had given up the thought of tying him, and he usually went with me, quite as a matter of course.
At the post-office one morning, I received a letter from my lawyers, stating that I had fallen heir to another ancestral estate about one hundred miles south of my present habitation. My grandfather on my mother’s side had just been reaped, and this testimonial of his affection was left to me. I folded the letter idly and stood for some moments, lost in deep thought. Jagg snatched it out of my hand and ate it, but not before I had made myself master of its contents. Later on, I was thankful for the ponderous verbiage with which the idea was practically swamped, though, as it happened, the obscurity was useless, the legal description of the property being appended.
Jagg ruminated for some time upon the letter, but experienced no personal discomfort. He was very intelligent and doubtless believed, with the great Macaulay, that “a page digested is better than a book hurriedly read.”
Still we lived together—that is, Jagg lived, and I existed. The sight of him, through constant attrition, became an annoyance, and finally an irritation. He ate my clothes, tore all the love scenes out of my small but choice library of fiction, and took my article on Natural History Shams to ornament the head of his bed.
Before long I discovered an infallible method of communicating with him. I would write my remarks on a small slip of paper, in my fine Italian hand, and feed the paper to Jagg. As soon as it was assimilated into his system, he understood, but his answers were limited. He could shake his head when he meant “no” and nod when he meant “yes.” A bleat, of indescribable tonality, meant that he was unfamiliar with the topic, or else prevented by his personal handicap from making any sort of an explanation.
For instance, one fine morning, just at sunrise, I wrote: “Jagg, I am going to the village this afternoon. Will you be a nice Goatie and stay at home?”