For the past few seasons I’ve received a couple of unusual panhandlers. On the face of it, they were Canadian, though I heard them speak neither French nor English. They just kind of sat silently, patiently on cold water, fixing me stares through expectant eyes.
What began as a flying visit soon became a daily occurrence. Those expectant eyes soon started forming words of their own, like : ‘We’re peckish, so feed the beak’. And so i would dutifully open the swan hatch and break little bits of the baker’s dozen, hand-nourishing them with all the love and affection that only a mother could muster. The male – i knew he was a male because of the longer neck and the tendency to forsake his own hunger for the increased dietary needs of his pregnant missus – he was something to admire. He was selfless yet would keep her in line with a peck to the nape when her avarice got the better of her. With balletic charm she would round him and then leap up and snatch, warily, at the tasty morsels pinched between my fingers. His was no desperate lunge. He would take from my hand with a kind of gentle insouciance. Soon they grew bold and I, in turn, grew so fond of them that as he would take from my hand, with the other I would pat the feathers on his perfectly little anserine head. This interaction with wildlife I thought would never end, so much so that when they had their brood of goslings I imagined they would make me honorary godfather.
But nothing living lasts. Tragedy comes to remind us of that.
Last Friday I came upon a scene so distressing I’m still mulling over it days later. I saw a Canada goose flailing in the water right where my pair used to line up at the window to Scott’s wildlife soup kitchen. She was waterlogged and struggling to stay afloat. Sensing her end, the white swans soon encircled her. Initially I perceived them as a merciless mob who gained in strength from the weakness of others. Later i was to be informed that they do this because they are angels of death, white in their feathery shroud to deliver the condemned from protracted pain and suffering. Nature appears cruel but only in the pursuit of kindness.
She was in a terrible state, this Canada goose. Immediately recognising her as the feminine short-neck of my long-standing pair, her terrible suffering behoved me to act. I ran down the river bank as the current was carrying her away. But when I got too near she would flail with her one good side and, listing like a holed ship, paddle with all her might away from me and back into the waiting swans that loitered ready to euthanise her. Her movements made no sense. Waterlogged, limbs broken, her dignity was a thing of yesterday. Heavy now her plumage was a scrambled mess, she went under. I thought she was gone until, through one final death defiance, she surfaced and paddled away. Her mangled wing could have been an outrigger. She had no idea the extent of her wounds. This fact saddened me more.
I called the swan rescue society. England has its faults, but lack of compassion for animals is not one of them. A woman wasted no time in coming out to assist. With her she carried a hook and a net. After what seemed an eternity of trying to capture the bird, i scooped up the poor thing. She was cold, drenched and her wing horribly broken at the clavicle. We agreed that this goose had probable flown into a lorry in the fading light of evening. I spoke of my long acquaintance with these pair of Canada geese. To the rescuer I relayed my fears that this poor animal’s devoted partner had also flown into the trailer of the lorry and was right now lying dead in a ditch. She agreed.
Carrying the injured goose to the woman’s car to be taken away to a vet and put to sleep, the goose did not struggle or protest. Instead a great calm came over her, almost as if she has resigned herself to her impending death. Swaddling her in warm covers, I placed her in the boot of the car. Her neck was limp and outstretched. With the bottomless love I have for all God’s creatures, I stroked the wet feathers on her head as those black eyes gazed up at me. In a way she was saying thanks. Tears began to fill me eyes. I did not know why I shed tears for this wild animal. I could not gauge the reason why i felt immeasurable pity and loss that what was only the day before one half of a beautiful pair who went everywhere together in all seasons, even winter with hoary frost on their backs. In that very moment I felt such love for a wild animal. I felt loss. I mourned her life partner. And I believe she too, in her own way, felt not only the pain of terrible injury but also the pain of loss. Canada geese don’t betray emotions on their faces, so I’ll never truly know if in those eyes lay the look of disorientation that engulfs us when we know our time has come, or whether these were the eyes of acceptance and quiet relief.
We leave this world not as we found it. Question is: do we find it again to leave it on different terms, this time knowing not to collide with that lorry? That in the life of an animal the tragedy of history is never repeated as farce?
The Blind Salamander 