The menace in France: in which our correspondent talks goats.(CULTURE WATCH)

IN these dark times, when war threatens to engulf a considerable portion of the globe, I hesitate to obtrude upon the public a merely personal problem; but the fact is that we in France--I mean my wife and I--have a border problem. Our neighbors' goats stray onto our land continually and cause us a great deal of irritation.

We live in a region where lotus-eaters and other marginal types gather. Our nearest town is full of aging hippies, the women in cheesecloth and the men with their increasingly scant and graying hair rather optimistically tied into a little bunch that they would like to be a ponytail. This part of France used to be strongly Protestant, but now I suspect that Buddhism is one of the larger minority religions. Certainly, there seem to be a number of shops selling incense-scented candles, wind chimes, and other minor accoutrements of Eastern spirituality.

But let us, as the French say, return to our sheep--or, in this case, goats. They have eaten our irises, they have eaten our sole olive tree. They climb onto the roof that the insurance company made us put on our well, for fear of children falling down it, and they enter the house and eat our dog's food. I have to keep my library locked, because they would otherwise devour the books. (Not that the books have no other natural enemies: The termites, the ants, the wasps, the hornets, the mice, and the rats are all potential biblioclasts--was it not Marx who complained that one of his manuscripts had been abandoned to the gnawing criticism of the mice?) As the Nigerians say, with regard to the corruption of civil servants and government officials, you can't keep a goat from eating yams.

Either the goats are very stupid or they are very intelligent. When they arrive, which is often, in fact several times a day, we rush out and throw stones at them. We have also bought catapults, but our expertise with these weapons is such that we often project our missiles only a foot or two from our own feet. Unused to throwing stones, my wife once fell and grazed herself on the ground, while my shoulder, in which I already have some kind of arthritis or muscular injury, aches for some hours after my exertions. So far the goats have inflicted more injuries on us than we have on them.

I have been surprised by how quickly our quasi-moral outrage against the goats turns into the excitement of the chase and then into the cruel urge to inflict injury on them. I imagine felling one of them with a stone and then administering the coup de grace, though I skate over in my mind the details of exactly how I will do this. Sometimes I do indeed manage to score a direct hit on the flank of a goat, which gives me a moment of satisfaction. The goat then retreats by a few yards, and continues to nibble at whatever vegetation then surrounds it, insolently retreating a little farther when I come within range of it again. So far, no number of direct hits has deterred the goats from returning. It has, however, occurred to me that one of them, who has horns, might turn the tables on me.

We were once so exasperated by them--they had repeatedly returned to the apple tree near the terrace on which we were eating our dinner--that we decided to employ what in the circumstances was a high-tech weapon upon them, namely our car. My wife drove it at them while they were on the stone track that passes our house.

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