In the Open
A CHRISTMAS GOOSE HUNT.
The graceful and beautiful wild goose that nests in the Canadian and Northern lakes and marshes, makes his winter home in Tennessee. I think it is the winter wheat that attracts him, as he passes over us, en route to Florida, for wheat is sown in October in Tennessee and by Christmas it is as green as the marsh grasses he left behind in Canada. I do not blame the wild goose for stopping. He has flown for many weary days and nights, over cold and lifeless lands; over mountains brown and sere; over woodlands stripped of leaves and bare and uninviting. All day long the “konk,” “konk” of the leader sounds from the point of the triangle that cuts its ceaseless way through the thin, cold air. Night after night they rest on frozen pond or reedy lake. But one day the air grows sweet and balmy; they look below them at a landscape, which, at their altitude, looks like a mighty lake whose waves are fields of green wheat, broken by islands of dark green hills. It is the Basin of Tennessee. No wonder they come down to earth again. If I were an angel with wings and on my way to heaven by the same route, methinks I’d do the same thing.
“But the wild goose did not always winter here,” said Mr. Adcock, the oldest goose hunter in my town. “I can remember when they first began to come in. I think they began to come in after the country got to be more open and the wheat fields so large that they could alight in the midst of one and the sentinel on guard could see the approach of any hunter. They live to an extreme old age. I know of one flock which winters annually in the Bear Creek neighborhood and has wintered there for forty-two years. The leader of the flock is known to be at least that old. He has a peculiar white mark on his back and is readily recognized each year by the hunters in that section. They propagate very fast in their summer homes, for when this flock left last year it had been reduced to eighteen in number. This year, when it came back, led again by the old gander, it had increased to two hundred and eighty. But I do not think there is a man in that country who would shoot at that old leader with the white mark on him.”
There has always been something peculiarly fascinating to me in the flight of a wild goose or wild duck. I have run up on wild turkeys and seen them in their wild and awkward flight, and while it is beautiful sport to kill a strutting old gobbler who comes to you, allured by your call, and while it is finer sport the next day to sample him when he is baked and browned to a queen’s taste, yet after all he is bred and raised with us, he comes from our woods, not from far distant shores, walks over the earth, does not cleave, like the wild goose, the
—“Pale, purpling evening—”
which in the language of the poet
—“Melts around thy flight.”
And so there is a mystery about him that, to me, is the mystery of other lands and worlds. There is about him the manner as of one who comes from distant climes; there is the everlasting wonder which to me always hangs around the whistle of wings, the admiration for the creature to whom God has given the power to soar above the sordid things of earth and bathe their plumage in that air which is born of the sunset and the silent stars. And in this connection where, in all language, is there a more beautiful poem of its kind than Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl?” I shall copy it in its entirety here, because it so beautifully expresses what we commoner mortals can only feel.
