Meanwhile, back in Vermont ...

I gave out a yelp when I heard the news.

“So I shot her.”

A big honkin’ ‘AH!.’ I startled myself, surprised that I’d have such an unguarded reaction to anything anymore, and wondering if anyone walking near me on Eighth Avenue even batted an eye. I was on my cell phone making an early morning call to Richard up in Vermont.

Let me back up a bit. The conversation began with love stuff and “how’s your morning going” and then fairly quickly Richard said:

“I’ve got something to tell you.”

‘Okay’ (Slightly wary)

“I woke up early this morning to the sound of the Canada Geese outside our window. It was such a pleasant soothing sound. And I sat up in bed to look down and there was the family walking along, very calmly, and all the chatter was coming from the injured one.”

To bring you back up to speed, one of the Canada Geese gosling’s has had an injured wing for weeks now. We’re pretty certain this happened during a predator attack it narrowly escaped leaving one of the major feathers of its left wing wrenched out at an odd angle. Both Richard and I had feared for the time when flying lessons would begin, and sure enough this past week it was unable to fly while its brothers and sisters sailed easily from the rise behind our house down to our pond. The parents by turns fretted and coddled “the injured one”, trying to remedy the situation, but to no avail. Richard and I had been going back and forth about what to do, fearing the hurt gosling would hold the others back, that the parents would not leave without it. Friends had recommended killing it. Our most recent option was going to be capturing it by dropping a blanket over it and putting it into one of our pet carriers and then calling VINS, the Vermont Institute for Natural Studies, to come pick it up and attempt to rehabilitate it.

“It had its head craned out in an aggressive way and was chattering. You had mentioned how the gosling still sounded like babies?”

‘Right.’

“It was only her; the other’s voices have changed. The rest of the family were just going along ahead of her, not really listening. I felt she was in pain, something wasn’t right. She shouldn’t have had her head craned out at such an angle.”

‘I saw her doing the same thing the other day while everyone else was just sitting around, paying little or no attention.’

“Right.” A slight pause. “So I shot her.”

‘AH!’

I was so shocked! (I still am.) I could not believe he had done it. And I know I’ve had many issues with the Canada Geese, but suddenly I was washed over by a tremendous sadness.

“The Canada Geese have become so trusting, I was right in among them. He was a little apart from them, so it was easy. I shot him and then I shot him again in the head to put him out of his misery. They all scattered and flew away.”

‘Oh my God. Wow.’

“I just felt it was in pain. And something must’ve attacked it. The wing feather was almost completely stripped and there was a hole in the webbing of one of its feet. It looked like a tooth mark. It was so beautiful, its feathers and all its markings. He was heavy, more heavily muscled then our girls.”

‘Uh-huh. Wow. Wow.’

“I prayed over it, told it how beautiful I thought it had been. I said thank you and then I drove it down to Swamp Road and put it off into the woods.”

I was so amazed and proud of Richard. It must’ve been so hard for him to do that. And me? I felt like a big ole marshmellow, all sad and mushy.

‘You did great, honey. Wow.’

“The rest of them flew back to the pond and for awhile you could hear the parents calling out for the other one; it lasted for about five minutes and then they quieted down. It’s going to be a sad day.”

‘Yeah, I bet.’

I just saw the documentary “Food Inc” the other day – a movie I highly recommend – and what struck me incontrovertibly was the idea that the way we treat animals is directly connected to the way we will treat others and the way we see the world. It makes such sense. You treat animals with disdain and disinterest, even cruelty, then it’s an easy step to be indifferent towards anything or anyone labeled “alien”, it’s easy to see other people as just numbers and figures, it’s easy to turn a blind eye. to not care.

“It just didn’t make sense to me to try and rehabilitate it when they’re trying to kill so many of them off in other areas of the country. And it was in pain, there was something that wasn’t right. Oh, wait …”

At this point, Richard got off the phone to check about Ginger and Mary Ann who were roused up by something in the orchard. When he stepped outside, they came running down to him, wings flapping, honking at the sight of him. He thought they had been scared by something. I wondered aloud if they might’ve caught a whiff of the dead gosling’s blood, but he assured me that the killing had occurred in the side yard quite a ways from the orchard and that they hadn’t been unpinned yet, they wouldn’t have known what had happened. As we were winding up the phone call, Richard was treated to the sight of the “new” family of 5 Canada Geese flying as 1 for the first time. They landed on the pond gracefully and all seemed fine.

Richard thinks he’s going through a “toughen up big baby” phase, to steal one of his mother’s favorite phrases when he was growing up. Earlier this week this phase began with Richard delivering his roosters to be processed and coming upon Rob “the Processor” right there in his barnyard in the midst of the process. (Richard picks up the frozen birds at our favorite truck stop/exchange point later today.) Today the phase continued with putting the gosling out of its misery. Now watch, Richard’ll go get his hunting license and this fall hang out at the general store/snack bar down the road, dressed in blood stained camouflage, bragging about all the big game he bagged that morning. I can just see our walls festooned with the antlered trophies of all his kills. Maybe he’ll take up taxidermy. Just a thought.

I'm still amazed by that "AH!" And I'm wishing that I can plant spontaneous, plugged-in push points in my acting that will elicit such a pure, unthinking, natural response.

‘What a morning, huh?’

“Yeah.”