Trauma Farm (26 page)

14
ONE MORE FOR THE BIRDS
(AND THEIR FRIENDS)

T
HE PLAINTIVE CRY
of Chloe on a humid afternoon is like a gong flooding my mind year after year through our timeless story pool at Trauma Farm. And she will always be here every afternoon that I am alive on this land. She was the oldest survivor of our original flock of Toulouse geese—the most ancient domesticated variety of goose I know—descended from the wild Graylag.

There’s the usual confusion about how long ago the goose was domesticated. Even Darwin could only remark that it “is of very ancient date.” We know ducks lived with the Chinese at least four thousand years in the past, but the goose slipped more seamlessly into our culture, likely around then. Ducks and geese were the earliest poultry because they were large and gregarious and self-sufficient. The ancient Egyptians were fond of their geese, and according to Pliny, the temple geese of Rome were given the most “tender food.” This was because the sacred geese of Juno were credited with saving Rome in 390 bc when a raiding party of barbarians, sneaking in to sack the city, accidentally awoke the temple geese, which alerted the guards, and in the ensuing cacophony the whole city woke up and thrashed the unlucky pillagers. Geese are better than dogs as alarms, and they can create a spectacular racket if disturbed. This is why Dumbarton Distillery kept its beloved “Scotch Watch” of a hundred Chinese geese, enough to discourage the most ardent whisky thief.

At Trauma Farm visitors seldom catch us by surprise. Our earliest warning is the parrot, who has a view of the driveway from his window, and makes raucous, sometimes mortifying invitations. Outside, the geese start up (especially when we had the full flock), alerting Raj the peacock, and then the dogs rush down the road, barking. Although no neighbour is within sight of the farm, everyone hears that we have guests.

UPON BUYING THE FARM
, we were informed there was a tradition of maintaining the three resident geese—Lucy, Maude, and Chloe—and we thought it a good tradition. The interim caretakers (who had no interest in farming) told me they’d named them after a film about lesbian lovers. These geese were my first chance to study free-range animal behaviour for an extended period of years. That’s one of the delights of farming—living with the politics of animals.

During the first months there was a ruckus every day, with much squawking and honking, so we decided these geese needed a gander to sort them out. We were told to visit the elderly but still spry Howard Byron. There was nothing Howard didn’t know about animals, and what he didn’t know, his brother, Mike, did. After we negotiated a price for a gander in its prime, Howard ordered his collie, Big Mac, to fetch it.

Howard stood imperiously in his field, leaning on a long-handled fishnet, while the dog herded a goose through the maze of chickens, sheep, cattle, goats, and his blind pet deer. Mac, unerring and unrelenting, edged the gander up to Howard, who casually dropped the net on it. He was showing off, yet it was such a hammy display I fell for it. Mac got a biscuit and a pat on the head. We promptly named the gander Toulouse the Goose because that was the breed of our flock.

But life on a farm is never that straight a line. The ruckus continued for a few days. And then finally, in one of those majestic awakening moments, I realized that Lucy was a he, and Maude too, and both ganders were fighting over Chloe. I was horrified that we’d introduced a third gander— Toulouse. Luckily, wise old farmers and magic dogs aren’t perfect either. Sexing a goose is not a sure thing. Toulouse turned out to be no gander, and suddenly everybody paired up. Domestic bliss settled upon the farm.

Lucy is the king, old and monstrous, and we soon decided his name was the short form for Lucifer. My neighbour remembers him from her childhood, and her memories weren’t always pleasant. He lived up to the name. I’ve had to hold him off with a board more than a couple of times. His legs are bent and arthritic from wrestling raccoons after midnight, one of his many aggressive hobbies. He is also fond of chasing the horse. His favourite trick is to surprise Jack when he is eating and latch onto a hind leg, then hold fast, wings out, gliding behind the fleeing horse. A great stunt, which fed Lucy’s ego, though it embarrassed the horse. After letting go, Lucy would waddle around the field honking proudly, informing all that he was Lucy the mighty horse tamer. This he practised with regularity until Jack ran through the grape arbour with Lucy attached. Lucy’s wingspan was about two feet wider than the narrow arbour. He hit the posts with a thunk you could hear a block away. Once the feathers finally settled, Lucy staggered off like a drunk, his horse-wrangling days ended.

STANDING IN THE HOT
afternoon by the pond, remembering Lucy’s adventures with the horse returns me to a morning several years ago. I’m half asleep, still undressed, drinking my coffee. Sharon has gone to work, a twelve-hour shift at the emergency ward, and I’m looking forward to a sunny summer day on the land—the garlic needs pulling, and this good weather is perfect for drying the thousands of bulbs. Lucy and Chloe had hatched a flock of ten goslings. Lucy protected the eggs all spring, and his proud chest jutted out so far he was tripping over himself. Now he kept a careful eye out for eagles and walked a tight flock of goslings, with Chloe on rear guard. But today I noticed one of the goslings caught in the page-wire fence, its neck and wing through the wire square as it strangled itself. I put my cup down, slipped my gumboots on, and dashed out to the fence. It was only as I began extricating the thrashing little creature that I realized the gate was open and Lucy was approaching in full honk, aimed directly for a man’s most tender point.

The only thing I could do was turn aggressor, and since I already had one hand occupied, trying to release the nippy young goose, I grabbed Lucy by the throat and lifted him off the ground—an indignity he didn’t appreciate. He flapped his powerful wings at me, just out of range, squawking hoarsely as I tried to save his gosling. Then,
hell,
there was Chloe, and she went directly for the same delicate feature, and I found myself doing a bizarre calisthenic version of a samba dance, holding Lucy in the air, swooshing my ass to avoid the thrusts of Chloe, while still trying to release the gosling. Finally, I got it out of the wire and dumped Lucy on top of Chloe. It took a second for them to untangle themselves, and by then I was on my way to the house, where I slammed the deck gate shut.

Inside, I kicked off my gumboots and sat down with a graceless thud in my chair at the sunroom table. My coffee was still warm.

SEVER AL YEARS LATER, MAUDE
, the small gander, died of old age, which upset the balance again. There was obvious discomfort in the flock, but we tried to live with it. This puzzled me because I always assumed a gander would gather as many geese as he could service, but not with this gang. Toulouse and Chloe were competing. Finally, we brought in a new gander, whom we named Murphy because he was kind of stunned—brainless and full of himself. Chloe and Toulouse had the same opinion, and the mighty Lucy, although now ancient, brutalized him. Murphy got the cold shoulder from everyone and was forced to follow twenty yards behind the flock. Sometimes he managed discreet trysts with Toulouse if Lucifer the Terrible wasn’t looking. Those geese gave me more lessons in power politics than I had ever dreamed possible. One day something happened by the pond. Murphy got fed up with the bullying and swagger of Lucy, and the big fight was on. This time, Murphy won. Filled with the ego of the young stud in all his glory, he drove the ancient Lucy away.

The old giant sat lonely on the fringe, plaintively honking for his love of many years (geese are supposed to mate for life), Chloe, but the old tart defied tradition and switched her allegiance to the new hero. Once again I learned how time and history take us, though it broke my heart to watch Lucifer—so crushed by his defeat he even let the chickens drive him from the feed trough.

A week after he lost the battle with Murphy he had a stroke and could no longer walk much. He went blind, and since he couldn’t see Murphy, the young gander tormented him at will. This is the way it works in the natural world, but it also works other ways. I grabbed Murphy and cut off his head. Then I plucked and gutted him and we smoke-cooked him with a cranberry sauce on the side, proving once again to myself that not all the decisions we make while living with the natural world are smart or environmental— such as bringing a young gander into an old flock. But he was delicious.

A LITTLE OVER A
year later Toulouse died, probably from egg binding, a condition where a bird can’t lay an egg and goes toxic. This left only Chloe and Lucy. Lucy would swim blindly in circles for hours, honking, yet I didn’t have the strength to put him down. According to local estimates he was a fabulous thirty-seven years old. Every night I brought grain to the pond and poured it into the shallows so the sheep couldn’t eat it. Chloe, in an old-age display of tenderness, would honk, and he’d follow her voice to the grain and then step all over it, blindly feeding, while she stared in disgust at the mess he was making of their dinner. But every night she would call him in until he died, and we buried him under the willow tree.

If I consider the intelligence and politics of geese I can’t help but admire them—and regard with horror the gruesome practice of foie gras. When it comes toward me on a biscuit these days, I turn it away. I prefer our own version, with the livers of animals naturally raised that we’ve slaughtered. It’s not the same quality, yet it has some virtue—the animal wasn’t tortured. Because geese and ducks have no gag reflex, they are perfect vehicles for being tightly caged— in the old days with their feet nailed to the floor—and force-fed through tubes.
Foie gras
is merely the term for a diseased “fat liver.”

Chloe stood guard for years after we arrived at the farm. Her call in the night would rouse me, and I’d listen in the moonlight until I was sure she was not alerting us to a predator or a dog pack. She had the best ears on the farm, and when I cracked the feed bin in the late afternoon she’d bellow her dinner honk, which roused the sheep and brought them up from the lower fields to the troughs by the gate—until the day, only two years after I began telling this eighteen-year-long day, Sharon went out to feed the sheep and saw Chloe floating asleep in the pond with her neck tucked under her wing. It took Sharon a few minutes to realize that Chloe was dead. She returned to the house teary-eyed, and told me she thought Chloe had tucked up for the night, ancient and regal—then died in her sleep. That bird always had class.