It is a truth of our people that goats have always been with us: we imagine, if we are fanciful, that we rode on goatback from between Reiassannon’s legs, back in the Time Before Time.

A recent paper penned by the learned Scholar Piebryo-Tis seeks to dispel that notion, along with several other of our closely-held family stories, as it were.

The Ideztozhyuh Strode Out of the Mountain, Lannamer Stone Press, tells a story – one nearly as unbelievable as the fable of riding from the goddess’s thighs, if with more scholarly backing – of a possible origin of the Calenyena people, and, perhaps more importantly, of our goats.

In the extensive pages of this tome, Scholar Piebryo-Tis details finds from dusty archives left sitting since The Voyage, as Ideztozhyuh Strode refers to the mythical travel from another world. In these finds, the story goes, lies evidence that the first goats were hardly larger than the horses you’ll see running around some mid-continent valleys.

While every schoolchild knows that goats are bred for stamina, size, wool, milk, and temperament, it is one thing to think of gaining a [term here translates as “knot” but means, pretty much, “hand;” a unit of measurement about 4″ or a decimeter long] or sleeker wool; it is quite another to think of starting from the size of a modern newborn kid.

That is, of course, not the only revolutionary idea in Scholar Piebryo-Tis’ work. Among other thoughts unlikely to come into common acceptance any time soon: that the Ideztozhyuh, Piebryo-Tis’ word for these proto-Calenyena, were illiterate until they encountered the mythical Writing People, who taught them language; that the Ideztozhyuh learned to dye fabric from the Bitrani (ridiculous! We’d still all be wearing brown wool!); and that the Ideztozhyuh learned to ride goats from a stranger from another mountain.

Scholar Piebryo-Tis’ sources are fascinating, and the work involved in finding all of this material was clearly well-done. If the Scholar would stick to the facts and not go off on weasel-tracks, this would be a much more solid read.

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