Then, when the animals within the ruin were fully alive to the situation and awake to the knowledge that it all meant carrots, and that outside carrots innumerable awaited the gathering, they streamed forth: they fought in the doorways, they battered a passage through the broken wall; faint plaintive queries went up from scores of throats, answered by gluttonous mumblings from goats that had been fortunate enough to snatch a morsel of the delectable vegetable.

Down from the tips and up from the bob-pit they came, singly and in sets, undemonstrative matrons with weak-kneed twins at their heels, skittish kids and bearded veterans, and joined the anxious, eager, hungry mob.
'Away with them, my boys,' ordered Moonlighter.

'Head 'em fer the common.
We'll have every blessed goat in the place.' He sent away three bands in three different directions, fully provisioned, and commissioned to collect goats from all quarters.
'Bring 'em up to the main mob on the common, an' the man what makes a row I'll hang in his shirt to the nearest tree.

Don't leave the beggars any kind of a goat at all.' Dick had undertaken a big contract.

Cow Flat was simply infested with goats; every family owned its small flock, and the milk-supply of the township depended entirely upon the droves of nannies that grubbed for sustenance on the stony ridges or the bare, burnt stretch of common land.
Probably Cow Flat was so called because nobody had ever seen anything remotely resembling a cow anywhere in the vicinity; consequently goats were hold in high esteem, for ten goats can live and prosper where one cow would die of hunger and melancholy in a month.
Jacker Mack, Peterson, and Parrot Cann had recognised their billies in the heard, but Butts was still missing.