They can sense it, you know.
The fear.
It's almost as if they are drawn to it.
Smell it.
"We moved away because I was frightened" the woman said, pushing the trolley speedily away from where a cluster of birds were squabbling over the seed dropped onto the path for them.
But the geese, as geese will, were hissing at them and frightening the child. Or maybe they were just frightening the mother, it was hard to tell. But whichever of them it was, they moved away just as sharply as two legs and an indeterminate number of small wheels could carry them, and settled elsewhere.
So those geese, they followed them...
I had a bad experience with a goose, you know, when I was a child. Funnily enough, my sister reminded me of it just the other day. A gaggle of them surrounded me when we were staying at a holiday camp when I was about five years old and it did rather traumatise me, I'm told.
I can't remember now whether I was actually bitten, but there would have been hissing, I'm sure.
Still, I'm over it now and find them to be rather magnificent and intriguing creatures, especially when they are capable of being use as "guard geese" because of their notorious ways.
They also feature rather heavily in my all-time favourite episode of "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" starring Jeremy Brett, "The Blue Carbuncle" which we try to make a point of finding time to sit down and watch every Christmas, although, obviously, the story doesn't turn out too well for the geese involved in that particular caper.
Ah! Embden geese - my favourites. We used to have a trio of these in our back garden to keep the neighbours children out as nothing else had worked! They were called Lancelot, Morwenna and Guinevere, and fearsome, magnificent creatures they were, too! It was a French goose, like the ones in the background of your photograph, that got you on holiday, and yes, it did leave its mark!
ReplyDeleteI've now got visions of "Goose Camelot"
Delete(There's an illustrated children's book in there somewhere...)