CARLTON FLETCHER: When fainting goats butt in

I’m a goat, and for those of y’all who don’t know what a goat is, it means the greatest of all time.

— Eminem

The call was one of those you hate to get, the ones that scare the bejeezwiz out of you no matter what you’ve got going on.

“You need to get to the house right away. The alarm’s going off.”

When the house is a good 20-minute drive away, you don’t sit around and muddle possibilities. You get in the vehicle and start driving.

Of course while you’re traversing the 15 miles or so between work and home — in the old beat-to-crap vehicle that’s always come through for you over some 10 years and 220,000 miles of wear and tear — those possibilities that you avoided while rushing down the stairs come streaming in, unbidden.

You hope that maybe the feline trio of Nernge, Dude and Piper has somehow tripped something that set off the alarm — something that hasn’t happened in the three years you’ve lived there — but things like fire, burglary, natural disaster and other acts of mayhem force out the “there’s got to be a reasonable explanation.” So you push the old Ford a little harder, coaxing it to remember the days when it still had that new-car smell and the driver’s side mirror was still attached by the factory and not a few well-placed screws.

When you arrive at the privacy gate that’s almost a half-mile from the house, and you see a Lee County Sheriff’s Office vehicle waiting, the old heartbeat kicks it up a notch or so. You feel only slightly better when he tells you he rode down a neighbor’s parallel access road and didn’t see anything that would make him think he needed to break down any fencing or tear up anyone’s lawn.

You follow the deputy down the rutted and potholed half-mile dirt road to the house and, seeing nothing amiss, enter tentatively with the deputy right behind you, hand on his weapon.

A quick but thorough search — living room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms (yes, behind the shower curtains), laundry room — reveals nothing. The thorough deputy, very professional in every respect, suggests you take a closer look where valuables might be located, and again everything checks out.

So, other than concern over what might have triggered the alarm, you relax, get your breath, then do another full search of the premises, just to make sure there’s no tell-tale sign you missed. A search outside also reveals nothing amiss, so you chalk it up as a fluke.

Until your tech-savvy 15-year-old daughter arrives on the scene. On a lark, she tells you, she recently set up the motion-detection camera that her brother had in the past utilized on hunting land to see what kind of wildlife was roaming the property. He’d moved away, the camera wasn’t being used, so she set it up so that it would keep a panoramic record of goings-on in the front yard.

Rewinding back from the time the sheriff’s deputy and I arrived, she — Nancy Drewlike — was able to pinpoint the timeframe that the alarm went off. The three of us — the 15-year-old, her mom and I — watched in anticipation as the video images unfolded in vivid, hi-definition. There were exclamations of surprise as we watched the evidence that there had indeed been an attempt to breech the front door.

One of the male “fainting goats” on the property — I’m sure animal-lovers and vets know the proper and official names for these amazing creatures, but I just call them fainting goats because, well, if you scare them, their legs lock up and they keel over — had for some reason decided that there was something behind the front door that he wanted. Maybe he heard the cats roaming around inside, or maybe he just knew that the girl who fed him and his cohorts came out of that place every day.

In any case, it’s amazing to watch him on the video as he walks up the steps, lowers his head and gives the door a good butt. When the alarm code showed that the issue was with the front door, I immediately went out and looked over the area around the handle for any sign of tampering. I saw nothing.

But as the budding-detective 15-year-old and I took a closer look, we found a good-sized indention, goat-head level.

So the mystery of the alarm was solved. Now, though, there’s the issue of finding the breech in the fence where door-butting goats escape and stir up such mayhem.

Contact interim Editor Carlton Fletcher at [email protected] or follow on Twitter @ABH_Fletcher.