I saw a story the other day about how a man had trained a gander. It reminded me of my brother Cleo training Whitey, his gander, when Cleo was a teenager. This in turn brought to mind what it was like to have the geese around the farm and how they changed the dynamics of their fellow creatures.
As Dan said in one of his stories, my brother Ernest brought home some goose eggs from a neighbor one day. I’m sure Mom had made plans for the neighbor to send the eggs, and she knew she could count on Ernest to bring them home safely. Like all farmers’ wives, Mom was practical. I remember telling her that I thought ducks were cuter than geese, but she said ducks were too hard to raise because they would follow a stream of water anywhere and just keep going. So ducks were not to be considered. Mom didn’t mention it then, but I’m sure she knew that geese also had an advantage because they could provide goose down for pillows.
I wondered if tame geese would be like the Canadian geese that flew south in the fall. (Not the same as the common geese we see now.) When that happened, we would stop a minute to listen and look. We could see them flying in their V shape sometimes, but I remember often they would fly over just before dark, and some times we could only hear their sound. It was like something from another world, wild sky ghosts calling to each other, passing high over our heads. I knew their journey was something that nature controlled, and it was awe inspiring to me. Hazel explained that they knew instinctively where they were going and that they flew many, many miles toward their winter home. I felt a lot of sympathy for the geese having to fly so far and so long.
Now we were to have our own geese. Although we had never raised geese before, Mom knew what to do. She could tell when a hen was ready to “set”, and she knew which setting hen to entrust with the goose eggs. Hens were not all the same. Mom would fuss when one of them didn’t have “enough sense” to raise her brood. I remember one old hen would try to steal her nest out into the weeds rather than set where it would be safe in the chicken house. Baby chicks can drown quickly if their mother leads them through wet grass or worse still if a sudden shower comes. When it rained unexpectedly, we all had to move fast, scooping up chicks here and there, getting them into a dry place. (Donald said he remembers doing this, too.) To hatch these goose eggs, Mom chose a setting hen she knew to be dependable.
I had never seen baby geese before– their fuzzy down, their short legs and web feet, and the way their back end waddled side to side. I thought they were wonderful and they were so devoted to their “mama”, you would have thought they carried her DNA. But they didn’t carry her DNA. Poor mama hen. I remember watching her with the goslings. She was doing what good hens always do. She tried to teach them how to scratch in the dirt, but their web feet weren’t made for that although they liked the bugs she found. She showed them where they could get a drink of water, but they thought water was made for swimming. They made an awful mess. I had to draw fresh water from our well lots of times every day because the goslings would splash the chickens’ watering pans dry.
To keep them safe at night, we put the hen and her family in a coop where they could walk right inside. When mama hen took the goslings to bed every night, they were happy to gather under her wings. She really had to spread out wide as they grew bigger. We put a board across the opening and a heavy rock against the board. Often one of my jobs was to make sure the hen and family (and the other chickens) were fastened up at night. We all knew that foxes or other predators would come at night to prey on our chickens; and certainly the hen and goslings would have been in danger too if they did not have a safe place to spend the night.
As frustrated as that poor mother hen must have been, she got her brood raised just fine. They soon outgrew their mama. They also outgrew the other chickens which meant they had to be separated. They still needed protection at night, so they stayed in the barn. The boys made a little pond in the creek in the woodland for the geese to swim. It was never a big pond and the wall of it often just washed away, but the geese were very happy splashing there..
As they got to be adults, we discovered geese could be loud. If anything new or strange came around, every one of them would stretch out their necks all together, the short neck feathers standing upright to show their alarm, and they let go in a squawky noise. Day or night. It was not pretty like a bird’s song. It was just loud.
I don’t know when Cleo began to train Whitey, but I’m pretty sure it was after the geese were living at the barn. It is still astonishing to think that a gander could be so devoted to one person. Actually the whole flock was like the subjects of a king. They greeted Cleo with excitement and gathered around him. The imprint was strong. But only for Cleo. At one time Whitey attacked Donald, really coming after him with neck outstretched to grab hold, big wings flogging him on both sides. Donald escaped but Whitey pulled a whole placket of buttons off his jump jacket. Another time David said Whitey attacked him, and that gander kept coming even while David was trying to run away. Mom happened to see this happen. She scolded the gander and then she scolded Cleo, David told me. Whitey was proud after his attacks. He would go waddling back to his group with his neck out stretched, and the whole flock would greet him with loud congratulations.
Oh, my how proud he was. It must have been amazing to Cleo himself that Whitey was so devoted to him only. I remember the one time Whitey pinched me with his bill when I tried to talk to him like Cleo did. Yep, it hurt. He did not want to make friends with me.
Still I’m glad we had the geese. I especially liked them when they were goslings. I liked to pick them up and pet them almost like a kitten.
And Mom did get some down for her pillows. With every feather she pulled, the geese would honk, but Mom would stick their necks up under her arm somehow (to keep them from biting her) and go to it. Maybe some of my nephews and nieces remember how Mom made pillows for the grand- children. It makes me feel proud of her. The grand children at that time probably didn’t know that Mom had very little money. But those small pillows were more precious than other gifts might have been since they came from the work of her hands. They were simply made of small bunches of soft down, covered in simple fabrics. But each one was unique, each one was comfortable, and each one was just the right size for a little child. Remember?