Reflections by Doc Arnett

The red and white gelding, Earl, was chomping away on his morning ration inside the open shed. A few yards away, Harley, the black and white gelding, was doing the same at his feeder inside the round pen. Koda, the black and white miniature Aussie, was happily perched on top of the little utility table we keep right outside the barn. I was probably the least enthusiastic member of the ensemble; I was mucking the round pen. Shoveling up hard remnants of partially processed hay and clunking them into the wheelbarrow. The only sounds were of the horses licking their plastic feeders and the scraping of my muck fork against the frozen sand.

Suddenly, the tranquility of a mundane morning erupted into a small cacophony of disturbance. Both horses snorted and jumped and rushed together, looking around excitedly and blustering loudly. The dog barked. I heard a noise in the branches of the maple tree at the upper end of the paddock and saw a blur of white swooping down to the ground. Something yanked my attention overhead and I looked up to see an eagle wildly pumping its wings backward, no more than twenty feet above the barn roof.

The blur of white turned out to be a goose that was smaller and shorter than a Canadian goose and had a reddish-orange beak. I quickly turned back to track the eagle. It curved in a steep bank around the huge cottonwood that spans the round pen and driveway. I thought it might come back and attack the goose on the ground but I suppose the commotion of the horses, dog, and muck-picker persuaded it to seek breakfast elsewhere.

I looked back at the goose and watched it calmly strutting its way across the upper end of the paddock, under the gate and around the cottonwood tree. Its path looped a loose arc staying about twenty feet away from me, on the opposite side of the corral fence, until it got to the gravel driveway. “That’s not a really good place to hide from an eagle,” I thought and returned to my task. The horses ignored whatever bits were left in their feeders and walked around to the corner of the paddock so they could see what the goose was doing.

It was calmly preening itself, right in the middle of the driveway. Realigning all the frazzled feathers from a close encounter of the almost final kind with the eagle. I did not look up in time to see the prelude to the crashing through the maple branches. I don’t know if the eagle somehow lost its grip on the lucky ducky or if the prey darted through the maple in a last ditch maneuver that prevented its being caught.

As I looked around for any feathers on the ground, I mused, “I guess I should call the Whittens and the Boos and see if they’re missing a goose.” Its calm saunter in such close quarters to me and the horses made me think it must be a domesticated variety. While I continued mucking the paddock and the horses continued their surveillance, the goose continued its feather reorientation project.

By the time I finished preening the paddock about fifteen minutes later, the horses turned their attention to the big bale of hay. Koda was once again sitting calmly on the table, intently focused on the goose about a hundred feet away. It had settled in underneath the horse trailer, about fifteen feet off the driveway. “Great,” I muttered sarcastically to myself, “now we’ll have that thing crapping all around the place.”

I put the wheelbarrow and muck fork back in the barn and latched the double doors. Then, I went over and petted Koda briefly, then pulled the leash loose from its anchoring spot. She jumped down from the table and immediately started pulling forward in the direction of the goose, which by then had sauntered back out from under the trailer. It took a few steps toward the pasture fence. When the dog and I were within thirty feet or so, it squatted and then sprang up off the ground, wings flapping.

“Well, look, Koda, the neighbor’s goose is going to flutter over the fence and then check out our pasture.” I figured twenty or thirty feet would be as far as a domesticated goose could fly. Boy Howdy, was I mistaken!

That goose took off like a slow motion version of a fighter jet launching from a carrier deck. It flew upward and outward, heading straight south above Peter’s Creek. By the time it got to the creek, it was a few hundred feet high in the air. With the low skies we had, it disappeared about a third of a mile away. “Domestic goose, my rear end!” I confronted myself.

I realized my mistake almost as soon as it cleared the fence; I could see the striking black swatch of feathers that tipped each wing. It was a snow goose, probably as wild as the wind and thrice as lucky. To the Google list of snow goose evasion techniques that include erratic flight changes and diving into water, I’d like to add another: crashing through maple branches.

I’m sure it must have stung, hitting those frozen stems at thirty miles an hour. But when your soul is in danger, when your spirit is threatened by the forces of darkness—including the darkness that lurks within us—you do whatever it takes to escape. Even if it means losing a few feathers in the process.

To paraphrase an ancient Carpenter: it is better to enter into Heaven with both wings half-plucked than to have all your feathers and land Elsewhere.