5
WILD GEESE
I could not stay away entirely that winter. After a week or ten days of hard work, night-classes and furnace air—imagination would work to the extent that a day by the open fire was required. It seemed to me some days that I wanted a century of silence.... There was one bright cold mid-March day, the northern shore still frozen a mile out. I had come forth from the city to smell wood-smoke, a spring symptom. It was now sunset. In the noble stillness, which for many moments had been broken only by the sagging of the dead ice, there came now a great cackling of geese, so that I looked up the lane a quarter of a mile to the nearest farmyard, wondering who had turned loose the collie pups. It hadn't occurred to me to look up; and that, when you come to think of it, is one of the tragedies of being city-bred.
Presently I had to. Voices of wild geese carry with astonishing force and accuracy. A hundred yards ahead was the long-necked gander, with the lines of a destroyer, his wings sweeping more slowly because of their strength and gear, yet he was making the pace. Then came his second in command, also alone, and as far back again, the point of the V. In this case, the formation was uneven, the left oblique being twice as extended as the right.... They were all cackling, as I imagined, because of the open water ahead, for geese either honk or are silent in passage. They began to break just above, the formation shattering piece by piece as they swept on with wild ardour toward the ice-openings. Coming up from the thrall of the thing, I found my hat in hand.
It would shake any one. Indeed, there's a fine thrill in the flight of ducks—darting dwarfs compared to these standard-breds, whose pinions sweep but once to the triple-beat of the twinkling red-heads and canvas-backs. You can tell the difference by the twinkle, when the distance over water confuses the eye as to size. Mighty twelve-pounders with a five-foot spread of wing, many of these, and with more than a suggestion of the swan's mystic grandeur in passing.
Somewhere back of memory, most of us have strange relations with the wild things. Something deeper than the beauty of them thrills. Moments of music stir these inward animations; or steaming for the first time into certain oriental harbours. Suddenly we are estranged from the self, as we know it, and are greater beings. I feel as new as a tourist before Niagara or Montmorency, but as old as Paul and Silas in the presence of the Chinese Wall. The lips of many men, strange save to common sayings, are loosed to murmurings of deepest yearning before the spectacle of a full-rigged ship; and it matters not if, within memory, they have ever felt the tug of filling cloth in the timber underfoot, or crossed even an inland waterway without steam. It was this that the flight of geese gave me—a throb from the ancient and perennial romance of the soul.
Many a man goes gunning on the same principle, and thinks that the urge is game. It isn't so, unless he is a mere animated stomach; the many think they have come into their own as they go to sea, the vibration of the triple-screws singing along the keel.... They pass an iceberg or a derelict, some contour of tropical shore, a fishing fleet, or an old fore-and-after, and the steamer is a stifling modern metropolis after that—galley and stoke-hole its slums. Then and there, they vow some time really to go to sea.