It was plain that he had no accurate knowledge of birds; if he had caught sight of a kingfisher or green woodpecker, he would probably have described it as a sort of peacock. Of the goose, he only knew that it is a ridiculous, awkward creature, proverbial for its stupidity, although very good to eat; and it wounded him to find that any one could think so meanly of his intelligence and taste as to imagine him capable of greatly admiring any bird called a goose, or any bird in any way related to a goose.
I will now leave the subject of the beautiful antarctic goose, the "bustard" of the horsemen of the pampas, and "sort of ostrich" of our Londoner, to relate a memory of my early years, and of how I first became an admirer of the familiar domestic goose. Never since have I looked on it in such favourable conditions.
Two miles from my home there stood an old mud-built house, thatched with rushes, and shaded by a few ancient half-dead trees. Here lived a very old woman with her two unmarried daughters, both withered and grey as their mother; indeed, in appearance, they were three amiable sister witches, all very very old. The high ground on which the house stood sloped down to an extensive reed- and rush-grown marsh, the source of an important stream; it was a paradise of wild fowl, swan, roseate spoonbill, herons white and herons grey, ducks of half a dozen species, snipe and painted snipe, and stilt, plover and godwit; the glossy ibis, and the great crested blue ibis with a powerful voice. All these interested, I might say fascinated, me less than the tame geese that spent most of their time in or on the borders of the marsh in the company of the wild birds. The three old women were so fond of their geese that they would not part with one for love or money; the most they would ever do would be to present an egg, in the laying season, to some visitor as a special mark of esteem.
It was a grand spectacle, when the entire flock, numbering upwards of a thousand, stood up on the marsh and raised their necks on a person's approach. It was grand to hear them, too, when, as often happened, they all burst out in a great screaming concert. I can hear that mighty uproar now!
With regard to the character of the sound: we have seen in a former chapter that the poet Cowper thought not meanly of the domestic grey goose as a vocalist, when heard on a common or even in a farmyard. But there is a vast difference in the effect produced on the mind when the sound is heard amid its natural surroundings in silent desert places. Even hearing them as I did, from a distance, on that great marsh, where they existed almost in a state of nature, the sound was not comparable to that of the perfectly wild bird in his native haunts. The cry of the wild grey-lag was described by Robert Gray in his Birds of the West of Scotland. Of the bird's voice he writes: "My most recent experiences (August 1870) in the Outer Hebrides remind me of a curious effect which I noted in connection with the call-note of this bird in these quiet solitudes. I had reached South Uist, and taken up my quarters under the hospitable roof of Mr Birnie, at Grogarry ... and in the stillness of the Sabbath morning following my arrival was aroused from sleep by the cries of the grey-lags as they flew past the house. Their voices, softened by distance, sounded not unpleasantly, reminding me of the clanging of church bells in the heart of a large town."
It is a fact, I think, that to many minds the mere wildness represented by the voice of a great wild bird in his lonely haunts is so grateful, that the sound itself, whatever its quality may be, delights, and is more than the most beautiful music. A certain distinguished man of letters and Church dignitary was once asked, a friend tells me, why he lived away from society, buried in the loneliest village on the dreary East coast; at that spot where, standing on the flat desolate shore you look over the North Sea, and have no land between you and far Spitzbergen. He answered, that he made his home there because it was the only spot in England in which, sitting in his own room, he could listen to the cry of the pink-footed goose. Only those who have lost their souls will fail to understand.
The geese I have described, belonging to the three old women, could fly remarkably well, and eventually some of them, during their flights down stream, discovered at a distance of about eight miles from home the immense, low, marshy plain bordering the sea-like Plata River. There were no houses and no people in that endless green, wet land, and they liked it so well that they visited it more and more often, in small flocks of a dozen to twenty birds, going and coming all day long, until all knew the road. It was observed that when a man on foot or on horseback appeared in sight of one of these flocks, the birds at this distance from home were as wary as really wild birds, and watched the stranger's approach in alarm, and when he was still at a considerable distance rose and flew away beyond sight.
The old dames grieved at this wandering spirit in their beloved birds, and became more and more anxious for their safety. But by this time the aged mother was fading visibly into the tomb, though so slowly that long months went by while she lay on her bed, a weird-looking object—I remember her well—leaner, greyer, more ghost-like, than the silent, lean, grey heron on the marsh hard by. And at last she faded out of life, aged, it was said by her descendants, a hundred and ten years; and, after she was dead, it was found that of that great company of noble birds there remained only a small remnant of about forty, and these were probably incapable of sustained flight. The others returned no more; but whether they met their death from duck and swan shooters in the marshes, or had followed the great river down to the sea, forgetting their home, was never known. For about a year after they had ceased going back, small flocks were occasionally seen in the marshes, very wild and strong on the wing, but even these, too, vanished at last.
It is probable that, but for powder and shot, the domestic goose of Europe, by occasionally taking to a feral life in thinly-settled countries, would ere this have become widely distributed over the earth.
And one wonders if in the long centuries running to thousands of years, of tame flightless existence, the strongest impulse of the wild migrant has been wholly extinguished in the domestic goose? We regard him as a comparatively unchangeable species, and it is probable that the unexercised faculty is not dead but sleeping, and would wake again in favourable circumstances. The strength of the wild bird's passion has been aptly described by Miss Dora Sigerson in her little poem, "The Flight of the Wild Geese." The poem, oddly enough, is not about geese but about men—wild Irishmen who were called Wild Geese; but the bird's powerful impulse and homing faculty are employed as an illustration, and admirably described:—