Geese are friends to no one, they bad mouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get used to their ingratitude and false accusations.
"If you're going to start doing weddings out here, you're going to have to do something about them geese."
George was right, of course, is generally right on matters of construction and farm animals. Over the last couple years, as notions for fixing up Wyldswood have floated through P's head and turned into concrete proposals to paint a room or turn a tool shed into a guest house, George has a way of guiding the conversation from her concept to his own vision for how things should be. It works because, by the end, P's convinced it was her idea all along.
Now the topic was the geese, Gus and O.G. (for "Other Gus"--we don't have the bandwidth these days to devote to naming a second old gander--the mean old bachelors who roam Wyldswood, crapping all over the concrete pad behind the barn and keeping the coyotes at bay. The two of them are meaner than striped snakes, always charging at you honking and biting, necks craned and wings folded back for aerodynamic efficiency as they snap at your heels.
They'll terrify the kids; hell, they terrify me sometimes. Someone will fall or get bitten, and we'll end up defendants in a lawsuit. It's concerning.
But things were not always so.
I remember when George brought them to the farm as a surprise for Peg in the spring of 2020, from Ocala I think. There were four back then, about the cutest things you ever saw.
Two females and two ganders, growing up in a family of birds who all arrived together at Wyldswood as babies. The waterfowl soon became inseparable, hanging around the pond or under the house whenever we were home.
Then the dying began.
First it was the female geese, disappeared but for a pile of feathers by the pond, likely killed by coyotes while defending their eggs. The boys never quite got over that loss.
Then one-by-one the predators killed the ducks, the final casualty stuffed into the crotch of a tree, likely by a bobcat, backside and feet hanging lifelessly there above my head one morning as I walked out to throw a little fish food.
But Gus and OG soldiered on, likely too big and too mean for some scrawny coyote to subdue. And the meanness that kept them alive in this sylvan kingdom of death made them unsuitable for human contact, always angry and spoiling for a fight, two cranky, involuntary bachelors.
We considered eating them as a way to address the issue, but except for maybe a gumbo they'd be too old and stringy by now. And besides, how do you kill two animals after letting them down by allowing their whole posse to be murdered? If they're this mean, it is kind of our fault for wandering off up north while predators lurked just beyond the fence line.
So we'll figure out how to accommodate their madness as we create a wedding venue at Wyldswood. George suggested to P that perhaps we could build a goose pen out by the new pole barn for when guests show up. I'm guessing he found a way to convince her it was her idea. But who's going to corral Gus and O.G. and force them into confinement? Have you seen those two? They're about the scariest birds you'll ever meet.
Comentários