My name is Owen Marsh. I am thirty-four, I keep six acres of hillside outside Halloran, and Biscuit is the smallest goat I have ever owned. She is a dwarf goat, knee-high, cream and tan, with one ear that folds. For two months her belly had been growing in a way that made the neighbours slow their trucks to look over the fence.

“She is just fat,” said my wife, Petra. “She eats the fence posts.”

But Biscuit had stopped eating the fence posts. She lay down more than she stood. And last Tuesday, when I ran my hand along her side, her belly was so tight and glossy that it shone like a polished drum, and I did not sleep that night.

So on Wednesday morning I lifted her into the back of the truck and drove forty minutes to Dr. Ilse Brandt, the only large-animal vet within sixty miles. Her clinic is an old brick building with a green-painted exam room, white vertical blinds, and a dark walnut cabinet. The ultrasound machine on the trolley is older than my truck, a beige box with a curved glass monitor and a cable as thick as a garden hose.

I lifted Biscuit onto the steel table and held her front hooves. Dr. Brandt is sixty, with steady hands and a habit of humming when she works. She squeezed the cold gel on, set the probe against that enormous belly, and the humming stopped almost at once.

The screen filled with grey shapes that kept changing. She slid the probe slowly to the left. She watched. She slid it back. For a full minute she said nothing at all, and then she looked straight at the monitor, and I watched her stop blinking.

I have seen that vet pull a calf in a snowstorm without changing her expression. Now her eyebrows went up, and her lips parted, and one hand came off the probe and gripped the edge of the trolley.

“Dr. Brandt?”

She did not answer. She slid the probe right. She looked at the screen again. Then, very slowly, she leaned over Biscuit and pressed the probe lower, and the picture on that little monitor rearranged itself into something that made her breathe out through her teeth.

“Owen,” she said, in a voice I did not like at all. “Don’t let go of her.”

“What is it? Is it bad? Is she in pain?”

“No. She is not in pain.” She looked at me then, and her eyes were very wide. “But you cannot take her home. Not tonight. Not one more mile.”

I stood there holding a goat’s hooves and feeling my heart in my ears.

“Count with me,” she said, and turned the monitor so I could see. She put the tip of one finger on the glass. “That is one. Here, that is two. That is three, four, and behind it, five. And that one, the small one tucked up under her ribs, is six.”

I thought I had heard her wrong. A dwarf goat carries one kid, sometimes two, and in a very good year three.

“Six?”

“I think seven,” said Dr. Brandt. “There is one hiding behind the others, and its heartbeat is fainter. Seven heartbeats, Owen, in a goat that weighs thirty-one pounds. She is going to deliver tonight, maybe within hours, and she cannot do it in the back of a truck on a gravel road.”

She locked the clinic door herself and phoned her assistant, then her sister, who keeps goats and owed her a favour, and then my wife. Petra arrived in twenty-five minutes with every clean towel in the house and a bag of warm molasses water. The three of us made a nest of straw in the corner of the exam room, and Biscuit walked into it and lay down with a sigh as if she had been waiting for someone to notice.

The first kid came at ten past nine that night. It was a little brown thing, soaking wet, and it sneezed. The second was tan. The third had a white blaze, and the fourth was so tiny that Dr. Brandt cupped it in one hand while she rubbed it dry with a towel, and said quietly, “Come on, come on, breathe.” It did.

Number five, number six. At half past midnight, when we were all exhausted and Petra was crying into a towel and laughing at the same time, Biscuit strained once more, and the seventh arrived, small, silent, the colour of cream. For a long moment it did not move.

Dr. Brandt put two fingers on its chest. She held them there. Then she smiled, slowly, the way you smile when you have been holding your breath all night. “There you are,” she whispered. The kid gave a tiny bleat that sounded like a rusty gate.

By morning all seven were up on wobbly legs, tumbling over each other and over Biscuit, who lay with her folded ear flat against the straw and looked completely unbothered. Dr. Brandt slept sitting up in a chair with a kid in her lap. We still keep the beige monitor’s printout on the fridge, seven grey blurs and a date. Petra says she will never call Biscuit fat again.

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