Walking with Goats

By Dan Blair
This article was printed in Abroad View magazine fall 2005

On the streets of San Isidro del Inca, some time between seven and nine in the morning, the goats come by. They are accompanied by hollers of “Leche! Leche de chivaaaa!”

Their lanky, soft-spoken goatherder struggles to guide them down the main street at that hour, waking up the neighborhood, or at least the dormilóns (sleep-lovers) like me. When they hear the goatherder’s call, parents come running out of their houses pulling their children along, and elderly couples step out onto their third floor balconies to signal to the goatherder that they will be down as quickly as their old but calcium-enriched bones will allow. It is urgent, you see, worth staring out the window for, or at least turning down the radio to listen to. Goat milk is something like a delicacy, my hairdresser says while cutting my blondness with her shears for two dollars. It is something special, something like ice cream, so the parents in San Isidro take their children to have goat milk if they hear the shouts before it is time to hop on the dusty buses to school, or on weekends when the hilltop market is bustling and the goats come by a bit later to catch the crowd. The first time I saw them, that’s where they were, at the market being harassed for their last drops of milk, and as he herded them home—a good two-mile walk from San Isidro—the goatherder told me to return on any morning at the same time to sample his product, always fresh squeezed as you wait.

In a city as steeped in the dividing pressures of modern urban life and rural existence as Quito, the vision of these goats, and the sound of their tinkling bells slowly drowned out by traffic as we headed into the city contrasted with walking the hillsides in Quito’s outskirts, where nothing is heard but the goats themselves, a rhythmic bleating, hooves on dirt.

The last time I saw the line of goats on the sidewalk, on my last full morning in Quito after even months, I asked the goatherder’s permission to join him on his route into the city—after all, we were both headed in that direction.

Efrain Castillo lives in Comite del Pueblo #2, one of north Quito’s most notoriously poor neighborhoods. He and his herd of twelve goats leave Comite at about six in the morning just as the sun rises above the volcano-serrated ridge to the east. If they were watching, those along his route would see his goats walking with udders swinging like pendulums keeping the rhythm of their lives—eat, sleep, walk, milk, repeat every day of the year. One thing is for sure: by the end of their five-mile tour of the city, their udders will swing empty, and although they may have routine lives, these aren’t your average goats. They get to travel, see the sights, run under parked semi-trucks, and cause general mayhem for Efrain, who hisses and grunts his goatherder sounds while chasing runaways across busy roads clouded by bus fumes and commuter traffic.

While Efrain is busy chasing after a few of his more adventurous goats, the others just sort of walk along the sidewalks or the roadside, putting their heads to the concrete, trying to figure out how to graze on the brutally hard terrain. Efrain has rounded up the wanderers and returns to advertising his product, and in ten minutes he has attracted eight customers who form, at its longest, a five-person line.

Efrain was attracting as many customers in ten minutes as an ice cream truck complete with syncopated sirens. At fifty cents per shot, he was making a killing off these goats. Fifty cents for a few ounces of milk squeezed directly into reused white, plastic cups. That same money could take you to the supermarket and back on the bus to buy a liter of cow milk for seventy-five cents. Each goat at peak efficiency could produce at least two liters of milk per day. Multiply that by a dozen goats and you get an average daily yield of about twenty liters. Before I get too involved in calculations, let’s just say that Efrain makes about forty dollars a day if he milks most of his herd, and the couple of times that I saw him, his goats walked home completely relieved.

We arrive at intersection with La Avenida de los Incas, and a taxi pulls up to the crowd of goats on the sidewalk. Its passenger jumps out and gets in line while the taxi waits on the curb. A woman hurriedly shuffles across the street with her granddaughter shyly attached to the crook of her arm. As Efrain runs after one of his remaining milkers the others wander off down an alley, their hooves clitter-clattering on the pavement, as they look for something to chew. He grabs the leg of the chosen goat, which is struggling and kicking back at him like a bleating jackhammer—or billyhammer, in this case. He completes the milking and gingerly, like a napkin-over-arm waiter pouring out champagne at a New York skybar, hands the plastic cup of overflowing froth to his customer. “Gracias, mi patrona.” Although we were milking goats on Quito’s concrete streets, the whole experience of walking with Efrain and his herd felt elegant. Here is the Bordeaux wine tasting of lower-middle class Quito. Here in the neighborhoods that Efrain walks through is an exquisite pleasure at a high price with excellent service—although sometimes the chefs run off.

As one of Efrain’s most valuable clients gulps down her second cup of the frothy delight and wipes away the residual milk mustache, she flashes her eyes over to me and poses a question: “How old do you think I am?”

“Fifty-five, maybe,” I reply, being as honest as I can while trying not to offend her if I overshoot.

“Sixty-five!” she guffaws, “and I blame it on the goat milk. It keeps me young. I have at least two cups a day.” She wouldn’t let Efrain move along until she saw me drink a cup. As he went chasing after his herd, she shouted to him, “The black goat! The black goat!” She explained that the black goats make the best milk, and as it was my first time, she wouldn’t let me try anything less. She gestured for me to hand her my camera, and when I tipped back the glass and felt the milk’s warmth on my lips, I heard the shutter snap open.

The day before I was to fly home from where the whole of humanity seems to tread a bit closer to the ground was the day I found the face of my neighborhood that stuck me most intensely. My neighbors and I gathered on the sidewalk to drink goat milk, all of us instilled with a little warmth on a chilly Quiteño morning. My hairdresser was right: for me, and for San Isidro, there truly is something special about this milk.

DAN BLAIR’S article was selected for publication from the ABROAD VIEW Writing Contest 2004. At the time this article was written, Dan was a 2003 graduate of Bucknell University, with a B.A. in English Literature and Language and a Pennsylvania teaching certification. He volunteered from 2003-2004 for WorldTeach Ecuador (www.worldteach.org) as a teacher at the ESPE Instituto de Idiomas in Quito.