Now, I personally can’t vouch for the truth of all of Grampa Walcott’s stories, on account of most of ’em happened before my time. All I can say is that Grampa is as truthful a man as you’ll find in Pigeon Inlet and that’s why today I don’t think I can do better than tell you Grampa’s story about the geese.
’Twas one fall’s day about sixty year ago, says Grampa, that he took his seven-eighths muzzle loader and went in on the barrens hoping to get a goose before they all left for the South’ard. Now, he didn’t see a thing until all at once he spotted this big black cloud rising in the Nor’west and headed straight for him. Thundercloud? No, ’twas geese, sure enough, but about two gunshots over his head. Anyway, he up gun, hoping he’d get a cripple or two, and fired.
Well, for the next few minutes, he said, there was a shower of geese falling on all sides of him. They were only stunned and the best he could do, he thought, was to secure as many of them as he could before they come to.
He had a ball of fishing line and he cut it into lengths and tied one end of each length to a goose’s neck and the other end to his belt, intending to finish ’em off when he got around to it. But he was too greedy. In all he had twenty-five of ’em fastened that way when they come to all at once and next thing Grampa knowed they were lifting him off the ground and flying away with him. In the excitement he dropped his knife so he couldn’t cut himself loose and in less time than it takes to tell it, there he was, up off the ground with twenty-five tow ropes stretched out ahead of him, headed for Florida, or Jamaica, or wherever it is geese go to spend their winters.
Now, Grampa says he personally got nothing against Florida, likewise Jamaica, but with forty quintals of fish in his stage at that time needing a few more hours sun, he just couldn’t afford the trip. So he started to figure a way to get down out of there. After all, a man who could handle his own schooner ought to able to steer a flock of geese. Grampa decided to take his bearings. He was flying face down, stretched as comfortable as on a feather bed and Red Indian Lake was just coming up on the skyline, so Grampa decided he’d try something.
Now, there was one big gander with a longer tow rope than the others so Grampa found the right string and give it a little jerk to starboard. Sure enough, the gander slewed and the others followed suit and a minute later Grampa was headed north straight for Pigeon Inlet. ’Twas only then, he says, that it dawned on him that here he was the first man ever to fly an airplane and if he could somehow turn it into a helicopter he might come through it alright.
He looked right down at his own house as he passed over Pigeon Inlet and there was Liz, Grandma she is now but they’d only been married a year or two then, and Liz was looking up at him making some kind of motions with her hands. Now, he was sure Liz was giving him some kind of signal, if only he could make out what it was. Well, by this time he was almost down off Belle Isle, so he twigged his gander hard aport and headed back towards Pigeon Inlet again.
Well now, by this time he was getting the hang of his steering gear, so he circled around a few times watching Liz until he made out her signal. She was making motions like ringing necks. Now, that was it. Why hadn’t he thought of it before. So he hauled in one goose by his painter and wrung his neck; then two more. Now there were only twenty-two tow ropes out ahead while he and the three dead ones were strung out behind and sure enough he was slowing down, a little bit, and dropping lower. Well, he kept circling around and looked down at Liz again and now he could make out a patch of something white on the ground right by her and he figured she had it there to guide him in making a landing. So he wrung more geese’s necks and kept circling lower and slower.
“At last,” says Grampa, “ I manouevered them until I was right fair over my house, then I wrung all their necks excepting three and there we hung. That old gander, what a bird, he and his two helpers were pointed straight up in the sky by this time and hardly holding up the weight of all the rest of us. I had one bad minute when Lige Bartle, seeing this strange thing up in the sky, started to come with his swiling gun. But Liz told him who it was.”
“Finally, I looked down again. The white patch was right below me. So I wrung the other two necks and me and that old gander fluttered down so gentle that I wouldn’t have cracked an egg if there’d been one on that white patch where my feet landed.”
“There I stood,” said Grampa, “chock to my waist in dead geese and glad to be back home again. ‘Liz, my dear,’ said I, ‘bless your heart for saving me.’ ‘Ben,’ said she, ‘take your dirty mucky boots off my clean tablecloth.’
‘But Liz,’ said I, ‘you did save me, you know, by advising me to wring their necks.’ ‘Ben,’ said she, ‘I was only telling you what I’d like to be doing to your neck, up there playing around with a lot of foolish geese. But,’ she said, ‘seeing as how you’re home again after all, wring that other one’s neck and let’s start picking ’em.’”
Well, Grampa untied the twenty-four geese from his belt and was just about to wring the gander’s neck too when something in that old bird’s expression made him change his mind. To hurt that bird, why it would be like hurting an old shipmate. So Grampa untied him and let him go. He circled around overhead a few times and then took off for Florida, or Jamaica, or wherever it is that geese go to spend their winters.
“And that,” said Grampa, “was my first and only helicopter trip. I was tempted to try it again,” he said, “more than once, ’cause that old gander used to pitch in front of my door every fall for years after with a length a string in his bill. But after eight or nine falls he give it up and I never seen him afterwards. Ah, but he was a wonderful, knowing bird.” Robinson Crusoe There’s no doubt about it, if Grampa Walcott had had a few years schooling when he was a boy, he’d have likely ended up a Senator or something. But he didn’t. The way he tells it, and there’s no one living old enough to contradict him, his schooling finished before it ever got started. He tells how one morning when he was six or seven year old, his poor old mother fitted him out and sent him off to school for the first and only time. He had a slate, a Primer and a slate pencil which was standard equipment in those days. But what ruined it all was that she made him take a little bottle of soapy water and a slate rag to clean his slate with; oh, an alright outfit for a girl but the boys in those days had a simpler way of cleaning their slates, not what we nowadays call sanitary and a bit hard on the elbows of your jacket. But still, there it was. Grampa knowed the other boys’d torment the life out of him if they seen his bottle and slate rag. So, half way through that morning, when his mother went up to the schoolhouse door to ask the teacher how he was getting on, the teacher said he hadn’t turned up to school at all. Well, later that same morning they found him where he’d crawled right up in under the Nor’west corner of the school where the sills come flush down with the ground, and it took Grampa’s father and the schoolmaster all they could do with a flake longer each to prise him out of it. Next morning his father took him fishing. which he’s been at off and on ever since. But ten year ago when that adult teacher was here holding night school, Grampa went. He didn’t learn how to write, excepting his own name, but he did learn how to read, especially print, and he can read out the words now almost as fast as his forefinger can move across the page. Why, last spring he started to read his first book. He commenced it just after Easter and he finished it last week. Now Grandma didn’t approve. In the first place, she said, ’twas only a old novel, whereas a man his age should be reading nothing but the Blessed Scripture. And besides, she said, it kept him hanging around the house under her feet like a broody fowl. Besides, he missed two Lodge sessions and a meeting of the Fisherman’s Local. I suppose he’d a missed church too once or twice but that Grandma wouldn’t stand for. Anyway, he finished the book and last Sunday evening after prayers he told me about it. “Mose,” he said, “did you ever read any books?” “One or two,” I said. “Boy,” he said, “you ought to read the one about Robinson Crusoe.” Well now, I have read Robinson Crusoe, but I didn’t want to spoil the conversation by saying so, so I asked Grampa what the book was about. “’Tis not so much, me son, what the book is about,” said Grampa, “although to give him his due, Robinson Crusoe would’ve made a first rate Pigeon Inletter. But a book like that,” said Grampa, “broadens a man’s mind: gives him a bigger outlook. Take my own case,” he said. “Until I read that book, I used to think that the man with the biggest appetite in this world was Uncle Sol Noddy. Uncle Sol was our cook on the Labrador one summer and one night he was cooking a feed of birds for our supper. We found out afterwards that while he was waiting to call us down into the foc’scle, he eat two turrs and a white winged diver and then had the gall to sit in with the rest of us and eat his regular supper. “But Uncle Sol,” said Grampa, “was a sparrow compared to these cannibals that Robinson Crusoe tells about. One day while Robinson was on this island by his self, he spotted a girt trap skiff full of these cannibals chasing this other poor fellow in his rodney and they chased him ashore right into the next cove to the one where Robinson was living. Robinson couldn’t understand what they were bawling about but he figured they must be awful mad with this poor fellow about something. “The book didn’t explain what they were mad with him about,” said Grampa, “ but it must have been something terrible. Perhaps he was a government official that was holding back their unemployment money, or perhaps he was a member of a Royal Commission. Anyway, what ever it was, they was going to make sure that what ever he’d done, he’d never do it again. “From where Robinson was hiding in his cove, he could hear a wonderful hullybaloo from the beach in the next cove so he went into his cave and got out his old swiling gun down off the rack. He crouchied down on his hands and knees and worked his way along to the bill of the point between the two coves and peeped over. Sure enough, they had this poor fellow caught and what do you think, Mose me son, they was getting ready to do to him?” “What?” said I. “They was getting ready to scoff ’un,” said Grampa, “Friday and all as it was. And I thought to myself,” said Grampa, “here’s where even Uncle Sol Noddy would a had to take back water.” “And did they scoff ’un, sure enough?” said I. “They would’ve,” said Grampa, “only just then Robinson let go with about seven fingers out of his old swiling gun, and these cannibals jumped aboard their trap skiff and made off, no doubt to catch theirselves a Friday fish dinner like they should a had in the first place. And that’s what I mean,” said Grampa, “about books broadening a man’s mind. I think,” said he, “next winter, I’ll read another one.”