Wild Delicate Seconds: 29 Wildlife Encounters

Canada Geese

Canada Geese 106 Canada Geese It is mid-December and a loose flotilla of nearly a hundred geese gather at a bend in the river, boating back and forth, lazily upending themselves to pluck weeds from the river bottom .All around them dinner-plate-sized pieces of ice raft past, turning in slow pirouettes, and the river steams, its sinuous black form set to a low boil,great welts of darkness swelling up out of it. I kneel in the snow blowing warm air on my finger. All the while the geese keep arriving. For the last hour groups of six, eight, and ten have been piloting in, each new group announcing their arrival from a half-mile off. One after the other, I watch them descend on a tethered line, necks stretched out, wings cupped in matching sickles.Always a great ballyhoo of calls rises to greet them, and at the last instant the geese back-pedal, skidding to a short halt by plowing a wide wake with their landing gear feet. They don’t wait, but launch into the news of the day, the brass band of their voices rising and falling as if with a tide. The geese mutter and honk,tossing their voices like rough stones into the sky, the strong yin-yang swoop of their face masks disappearing against the steep river bank. It’s not the answers, I have been told, but the questions that go deep. Above the geese the soft colors of the afternoon deepen into a tremendous wound and a gibbous moon is birthed, shadows crawling over the snow to dissolve into the river. More geese keep arriving, each new set making a circling pass overhead, arranging and rearranging themselves in a succession of syl- Wild Delicate Seconds 107 lables. Oracles on loan from the north, the geese pass above the deep green of the trees and I can’t help but think they are spelling something eternal,perhaps even vital,against the open fields of the sky. ...