The Bullhead Queen: A Year on Pioneer Lake

Geese on the Ice

Geese on the Ice 35 W e first saw the geese shortly before Christmas. In the gray light of a Sunday afternoon, our family went down to the lake to skate half an hour before supper. The north end of Pioneer had been frozen for several weeks, but a persistent patch of water had remained open until a few days before. Subzero temperatures had finally capped it, and we felt confident to head out over its glossy surface. As the girls and I dallied over our skate laces, using the disassembled dock as a warming bench, the boys raced away, the anxious Sheltie at their heels. They soon reappeared with a report: the ice was smooth down to Grandstrand’s, the cracks looked to run four inches thick, and there were six geese sitting on the surface at the point. Tom explained, “They look like oddballs. One’s all white, and one might have a broken wing.” Only three days ago there had been a flock of more than a hundred geese on the open water of Pioneer. Interspersed between the buff and black Canada geese had been one pure white bird, a stray domestic that had joined up with its wild cousins. “This is not good,” Audubon friends of ours had remarked over coffee. “Some years back, there was a farm goose on Pioneer, and when the lake froze, the bird was caught in the ice and died. They can’t fly, you know.” Since then, I’d been keeping an eye on the white goose and its compatriots. When the open water closed, the flock had disbanded, and I had assumed the birds had taken off for the bigger lakes that were still open. Apparently, all had but six: the white goose, the one with the broken wing, Broken Wing’s mate (probably), and three others. If I had the judicious heart of a true scientist, the situation wouldn’t have distressed me. Minnesota’s Canada goose population has swelled in the past several decades to nuisance numbers. A large percentage no longer migrates to the species’ historic wintering grounds but remains on waters kept artificially open by power plants or aerators. Their vast numbers deposit even vaster droppings on lakeshores and picnic areas and pollute the water with E. coli. Five Canada geese stranded on an iced-over lake should be called “natural selection,” not “tragic.” Life would be much easier for me if I did not respond sympathetically to the plight of small creatures. But the report of stranded geese (and one with a broken wing) made my stomach knot. What would they eat? How could they keep safe from predators? Still, what could I do to help the dumb clucks? My skates laced, I stood up and headed north, toward the alder thicket and away from the doomed birds, putting distance between me and their fate. Christmas came and with it the festivities of the season. The college kids arrived from school, bringing great baskets of dirty clothes and youthful zest. We had parties, we had feasts, we had glogg and aquavit, and I put the geese out of my mind. On New Year’s Eve, my brother-in-law stopped by. “Say, I see you’ve got geese on Pioneer,” he remarked. He said it in hushed tones, as one might say, “I hear so-and-so’s cancer is terminal.” My stomach did a little flip as if to say, “Oh, yeah, those birds . . . they’re still alive!” Then the conversation 36 Geese on the Ice turned to his remarkably fruitless ice fishing, and I forgot them once more. Christmas passed and Epiphany arrived, the season of light. A true Arctic chill settled over east central Minnesota, and we awoke each morning to temperatures far below zero, minus twenty degrees, minus twenty-five. Goldfinches and pine siskins clustered around the bird feeder, voraciously consuming seeds. January compensates for its frigid temperatures by providing us with clear sunny days of increasing length. I had bought a pair of slender skate skis shortly after Christmas, and I began spending time on the flat terrain of frozen Pioneer to teach myself the new sport. You see different things skiing on a snowy lake than you do skating on ice. Skate skiing around Pioneer at a laborious beginner’s pace, I noticed tracks. I looked behind me at the somewhat uneven, but nonetheless distinctive, herringbone...