I've mentioned my sister's young doeling, Cinderella, already. She was beautiful, a coloration known in the dairy goat world as "broken chamoisee". In plain english, she was brown with a black dorsal stripe and black stripes down her legs, with splashes of white overlaying this brown and black pattern. She was bigger than the other kids (with the exception of Snowdrop), long and leggy with a lot of spunk and spirit. When you looked at her, you just knew she was high quality. Sarah loved Cindy; she was athletic and bounced through the field and over obstacles with the sort of high spiritedness that makes you understand what people are really saying when they say that they "feel like a kid again". The other goat kids were fun and terribly playful too, but none of them were of the same caliber as Cinderella.

When I was walking the land one day and saw her laying on the ground next to some small saplings, I ran over to her right away. It was so uncharacteristic of her that I knew something was wrong, and it was. She'd gotten tangled up really badly, and her braided baling twine colar had twisted tightly around her neck, cutting off her air supply. I untangled her and untwisted the collar as fast as I could, hollered for help, but she seemed lifeless. Dad and his friend and other gathered around; we pressed on her ribcage, hoping to force air back into her lungs. I thought I saw her move, but it must have been just a reflex: Cindy had strangled to death. Billy, Lily's inbred buck kid, slated for meat, stood ten feet away, looking on. He was tangled up too, but alive. It figured that he would be the one to live while the beautiful, purebred doeling, th eonly one who could have been registered, died.

Sarah was devastated. We hauled her pet's body out of the woods and to the house. And then my parents did something awful: they decided that we would eat Cinderella. The laws and rules we followed regarding clean and unclean foods were quite specific in prohibiting eating meat that had been strangled, or which had died of itself, and Cindy fell into both these categories. Dad pooh-poohed this and hung her up on the silver poplar right outside the house and butchered her in front of us. I couldn't watch; this was just wrong! I went inside and found Sarah, who was sobbing uncontrollably. I told her exactly what I thought of what they were doing, but my anger did very little to assuage the pain of her loss, exacerbated by this callous act of greed. We had plenty of food. We weren't going hungry anymore. In firewood alone, and with mostly child labor, we were bringing in about $100 per day, and that wasn't counting the money Dad made on his timber sales. The whole thing seemed really unjustifiable to me.

Before long, the young doe had been reduced to chunks of red meat in the kitchen sink being wrapped up with white freezer paper. I'd been tending towards Craig and Lori's diet anyway, but that day clinched it for me. I was not eating Cinderella. Her meat was not kosher, she had been our pet, and feeding her to us was the height of insensitivity. Think of how I would have felt if it had been Lily who had died and was being served up to us as dinner! There was a big battle over it that night, but as always, I was emphatically stubborn. I would not eat her. Period.

They wouldn't tell me whether the meat in our meals was from Cindy or not, so I quit eating any and all meat. I didn't trust them not to try to sneak it to me somehow. Then Mom made sure that each and every meal we ate had meat in it, usually ground hamburger cooked until it was teeny, tiny crumbles that were almost impossible to avoid ingesting. I grew tired of this game, and started cooking vegetarian food for myself.

They pitched a fit. They told me that without meat, I would waste away and become weak. I might die! My breasts would wither away, Dad said warningly. Now that was an appealing thought. My breasts were what he liked the best. If they withered away.....maybe he would let me be. He had started creeping into our bedroom early in the morning, stealthily. If he found me still in bed, I awoke to find his hands caressing my body. Sometimes he would be trying to lay down next to me. I often saw him laying down next to Sarah in the morning. It had gotten to the point where my senses were so finely honed that when I heard even the slightest footstep, I awoke and leapt out of bed and stood next to it. Soemtimes I found myself standing next to the bed, virtually sleeping where I stood still, with no idea of how I had gotten there. He would be there, leering at me, but I was standing, awake, with no need for him to "wake me up". Not having the curse of full, luscious breasts defintely had its appeal. Despite their complaints and warnings, I abstained from meat completely after that.