Lucy did not appear on the lakeshore this morning, honking to announce her arrival, as she has for the past two and a half weeks. We can only assume that she was bagged by a goose hunter, as the season opened today. Not that it is legal to shoot a domestic goose - it most certainly is not. But Lucy was a wanderer, a free-spirit, apparently, of the farm goose world, and she took her chances with the wild things. Ultimately it was the humans who could not be trusted.
We don’t really know if she had ever been given a name by the people who raised her. I christened her Lucy - not very imaginatively, I’m afraid - after she appeared several successive days in our yard. We called around - 4-H clubs, the Extension office - but could find no clue as to where she came from. We even drove around the area looking for farms with poultry, but no luck. For a couple of days Lucy was joined by another female Pilgrim goose (which I named Polly), but Polly only came along for a couple of days, and then disappeared again. Polly was actually meaner-tempered, more suspicious, and honked a lot. I can only assume she did not care particularly for the free life and went home, wherever that was.
It was a tremendous amount of fun learning about Lucy - her breed, the Pilgrim, is relatively rare, and they are known for being mild-tempered. The first few days she stayed close to the lake, and would quickly swim off if anyone came close. Eventually she started coming closer to the house, and once even nested under the deck - leaving, naturally, lots of squishy evidence behind. But usually just before dark she would fly away, low across the water, to a small floating island of reeds about a half mile away (as the goose flies). It is out of sight of the house, so we only know about the spot because we were on our neighbor’s boat when suddenly the two geese (Lucy and Polly) went cruising by, and we saw where they landed. First thing in the morning she would come back, climb up the bank, and honk - not too much, just enough to let us know she was "home."Hubby is more of a farm person than I; he did not grow up on a farm, but near them, and had plenty of animals around. He fed her some cracked corn, and changed water in a pail for her every day (she frequently would stand by the pail and honk). I am more of a silly animal romantic, like the little girls who fall in love with horses but don’t know anything about their care and feeding.
Lucy would only come close to us if we were giving her pieces of bread - this clearly was something she knew about, and loved - in fact, she would come running (waddling really fast, that is). I loved looking at her beautiful feathers, and wished I could get my hands in them. I once got her to come close and then tried to pet her, but that was not to be tolerated, and it took a bit more bread before she would get near me again.
I am a vegetarian, so I grew weary of neighbor’s jokes about her being our Thanksgiving dinner. In a completely inconsistent way, however, I did lust after her feathers a bit: she would have provided enough for a nice goose down pillow. We were amused by her personality - she honked whenever a car came in the driveway; she would preen herself by splashing her head in the water in the pail, instead of just going into the lake. Silly goose! She liked hanging out near us, or seemed to - maybe it was just the possibility of bread.
We did think about catching her - we actually tried once, unsuccessfully. Lack of confidence, I think, and concern about hurting her. Of course, now she’s probably dead, so that was probably a misplaced concern.
It was hard not to get at least a little mad and sad this morning. Perhaps I am the silly goose for growing fond of a creature that appeared out of nowhere and that we were unprepared to shelter; silly for letting my heart get a little involved; silly for thinking she might be okay despite waking to the sound of shotguns; silly to hope the hunters would spare her.
