From the editor’s manger
Dear readers, kids, and the occasional bewildered tourist who followed a “GOAT CROSSING” sign and ended up in our hayloft:
It has been a noisy summer in the Ozarks.
Down in Ava a pair of doelings arrived while their people were off collecting ribbons, and someone had the good sense to name them after the two most honest words in fairground English: Mayhem and Midway. Up on Backbone Bluff, old Crisco — who never paid a camping fee and never learned to fear a camera — took his last look at Table Rock and stepped off the map. In Dade County a ranch still called The Goat Ranch continues to host ten thousand humans and, so far as we can tell, zero goats. Perryville is polishing its municipal goat park for October. A Wright County 4-H kid walked a seventy-five-pound meat wether into the Missouri State Fair and walked out a champion.
This is goat country. Not the calendar-picture kind. The kind where heat shimmers off chert, where a Nigerian Dwarf can be Grand Champion before lunch and a feral billy can be a local celebrity for fifteen years, where soap is still made two days a week in Marshfield and somebody is always arguing about raw milk regulations over biscuits.
The Arkatype Farms crew — Buttercup “Scoop” Nibbles (field), Buckminster “Inkhorn” Hayward (features), Nanny Belle Quill (society & costume), and our newest kid reporter, Button — have been turned loose on these facts with instructions to be interesting, be kind, and never invent a body temperature a goat did not earn.
I have edited their copy with a red grease pencil and the dignity of a Saanen who once placed Reserve at a show he will not name. Any remaining puns are my responsibility. The facts underneath belong to the hills.
Keep the mineral feeder full.
Watch the kids on the midway.
And if you visit Backbone Bluff this fall, take a quiet minute.
— Professor Gruff
Editor-in-Chief
The Bleat Sheet
“All the news that’s fit to chew.”