Eating Stone Read Free Page B

light.
    Would the geese forgive me, I wonder, for an act that I vowed never to commit: spooking them off their night roost, in the dense, confused dark, before they choose to go.
    These are not golf course geese, the fat Branta canadensis that leave worm rolls of poop on fairways and lawns and wreak havoc on suburbia. These huge water-loving—shouldn't they be in Canada?—birds live in a desert.
    They raise their goslings in a sandstone canyon and live by the miracle of the only wetlands for miles: the river and a few scattered farm ponds and livestock impoundments. They winter on the floodplain below our small town. Only the lack of open water—a rare, hard freeze—would spur them to migrate. They stay year-round. They live here.
    The weekend before, the hunters had arrived before dawn and slipped behind a makeshift blind of dried brush piled high enough to hide them. I did not notice them until I heard the firing of shotguns. As soon as the morning gave enough light, thehunters shot a dozen geese off the ground like a skeet shoot, birds killed where they stood, bodies hitting the ground with heavy thuds.
    “Jumping the roost,” it's called, technically legal but “illegal by proclamation,” say most sportsmen, and clearly unethical. Hunters of waterfowl usually fire at their prey on the fly. Airborne geese make ample targets. The birds plunge to the earth with a force of downward gravity that makes you gasp. But this is fair chase.
    Jump-shooting wild geese off their night field is not fair chase.
    Now, a week after the ground shoot, I thrash through rabbit-brush and tamarisk, which hit my face like whips. I am wearing a ragged sweatshirt, pajama bottoms, and socks. I am late for church.
    I stumble through our cottonwood grove and by memory, more than light, make my way across the field at the low end of our property. Beyond the fence lie the ranch bottom and the geese; beyond them, the river. It is too dark to see the Mercedes in the field. In the middle of the open flats, far from any roads, sits the hulking wreck of an abandoned metallic blue 1965 Mercedes-Benz, its doors flung open as if gowned starlets would soon emerge.
    The eastern horizon grows a band of light, whose strength the hunters await. I still move in the flat dimension of shadows and a fading moon, but I can hear the birds—low honks, feathers ruffling. What I need is a couple of the coyotes that live on the nearby river benches. Help me out with this, I say under my breath. But none appear.
    As difficult as it is to sneak through brittle, crunching plant stubble in socks and pajamas, I sneak. I climb over the barbed wire and posts of a fence corner without suffering an embarrassing evisceration. At the edge of the flock, I lie flat on my stomach, my nose full of dust.
    Among the dark bird shapes is a doomed glow of white: adomestic goose, a lonely domestic goose, which joined the flock earlier in the fall. It mingles with a seething gaggle of gray-brown birds with jet black necks and ear-to-ear chin bands. I'm waiting for it to look around and suddenly shriek, My God, I'm white! On the ground, the snow-white goose stands out like a polar bear in the Kalahari, drawing every last photon of crescent moonlight into an explosive burst of shoot-me neon.
    “Up” I rasp. “Fly.”Nothing happens.
    Dawn washes out the moon and makes graceful necks and wings faintly visible. Knees knocking, teeth chattering, eyes bugged in fear, the rancher's Angus cows are worried, too. We're black! they cry. If mere minutes pass, a lot of us creatures will get our butts full of buckshot.
    “Up!” I whisper again. The geese waddle about, all heads raised. Good, I think. Be nervous. Very nervous.
    Muttering in a dust puddle in plaid flannel is getting me nowhere. I rise up on hands and knees and growl.
    When a flock of wild geese takes flight all at once, you feel them press against your heart. I sit back on my heels as hundreds of wings push a mass of air toward me.