Long ago in my childhood I lived on a small farm. < sing >On this farm we had some geese "E-I-E-I-O"< /sing >. Now there was this one instance where there was a hurt goose and my aunt and I were trying to help it. It pecked me a hard one right on the forehead. I've been told that it sounded like a hammer hitting a watermelon. All I could hear was the ringing. That goose hit hard.
Then we also had a gander at the farm named Lester. Lester was I guess an alpha male or something. He was big and mean. In his younger days he would chase the kids on their bikes and bite the tires. Then he started biting at some of the dogs (the ones that wouldn't fight back). Eventually he worked his way up to chasing cars. It was weird. Lester bit me a few times.
Whenever I go to a park and there are geese they come after me. It even happened in Sweden. They were the King's geese. It's not like I could just drop kick them or something. It would have caused an international incident. Besides the King's geese didn't seem to stink as much as American Geese. I took some pity on them. (Oddly "HSZSSZZSHZSSZ" is pronounced exactly the same way in Sweden as it is in the US and Canada--that's right even the Francophone geese).
I've even had some run ins with Canada Geese (Most folks call them Canadian Geese but they're really Canada Geese). Don't get the idea that all Canadians are nice, polite and have good senses of humor. The goose and the gander are not to be messed with.
Tonight I went to the farm of my childhood. My aunt and uncle own it and it's usually fun to go back there. Except I had to deal with Henry (I think that was his name). As I drove up in my minivan this avian asshole started chasing after the side of my vehicle. He pecked at the door and tires (while the van was moving). When I got out of the van he looked right at me with his beady little black eye and stretched his neck out. He started barreling toward me. Of course I was laughing but then I realized he wasn't really bluffing. I took a couple steps backward and tried to scare him off by making a bunch of noise and jumping around. Of course he didn't care. He just kept honking and hissing at me. When he got close enough he decided that my shoes needed to die ([info]mistergrumpy would probably agree). He eventually realized he couldn't really hurt me and got bored and wandered off. I walked up to the house and said to my cousin Tom "What's with the goose?" He said "Ahh, he's just being a pecker" (get it? PECKER?) HA HA HA!
When I left the house, I didn't see the goose anywhere. I started strolling back to my van. Then out from behind a parked car comes this gray blur and a honking sound as if to say "A-Ha! You've come back for more!" He almost scared the crap out of me. It's a good thing I went potty before I left.
Posted by alycia at March 6, 2005 12:45 AM