The Ram

He is magnificent, the two year-old Katahdin ram in the small pen by our pole barn. We’ve had him since he was four months old, and my! How he’s grown! Now nearing the prime of life, he sports a perfect trophy set of strong horns that curve into a full circle on either side of his splendid head. His piercing, steady eyes gaze at all passersby with a watchful, calculative stare, and if you stare back too long, he will charge, tawny head lowered, into the flimsy welded horse wire fence locking him away from the outside world.

When he first came to us, he and his little flock of ewes would meander peacefully about our pasture, grazing as they went. Our dairy goat herd, however, pushed in on them, seemingly oblivious to the social circle of space that even animals practice. He resented this intrusion, and began pushing the goats away. Soon he was being too rough with the milking doe goats, who behave as if the world owes them everything. Since I do not have the fencing or pasture to separate them at this time, and I could not jeopardize my family’s fresh milk source, I have confined the ram to a small, 15’ x 15’ pen, where he is fed twice a day.

His aggression has grown. He charges the fence whenever anyone is near for more than a few seconds. He has not become a docile inmate who eagerly waits for his master to feed him. He has destroyed all of his feed and water buckets, and rammed holes in the welded wire fencing. He has put in many dizzying miles wearing a circular path around the lone elm shading his prison, pausing to raise his head and gaze longingly across the pasture toward his ewes who now mingle with the belligerent goats that have taught them bad behavior.

I will not leave him to winter in that barren little pen. After breeding season I had planned to butcher him, but it pains me to think of putting a bullet into that exquisitely fine head. I realize that he has come to represent to me the plight of the modern American White Man: hemmed in on all sides by a society, full of strangers, that has imbibed of a philosophy which denies his basic protective instincts and initiative, transforming him into a restless, aggressive, sometimes sullen, but somehow yet noble, creature.

No, I cannot butcher him for common table meat. I’m looking for another home for him, a wide open fertile place where he can graze in peace with his ewes and their lambs. I hope as much for all the strength of frustrated young white manhood I see everywhere about me in this blighted land today.

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