Have you ever wondered what farmyard animals get up to?
Meet Butch the gander. He was a handsome looking goose who used to strut his stuff around the farm with his 2 female companions, Harriet and Flo.
I must admit when it came time to putting them to bed it was not a job that I enjoyed. On one such evening Harriet and Flo were first to go into their house but oh no, not Butch. I swear my late boss used to hide around the corner to watch how long it would take to get Butch to bed.
You probably heard of a Mexican standoff, this was a goose stand-off. This obnoxious bird would push the boat out, on many occasions he would take great pleasure in running at you, neck and wings out honking as he ran. I was always told to stand your ground, it's good advice for the uninitiated.
On this occasion, I was hoping to get my evening jobs done and join some friends for a drink, but my evening of relaxation was fast going sideways with this bird. I’m not sure what came over me but I found myself leaping up and down waving my arms swearing like a gremlin. The bird stopped in its tracks, he bent his neck down took one good look at this flapping human in front of him, folded his wings in, shook himself, turned around, lifted his bum in the air and waddled off. I'm sure that bird was laughing at me.
A little while after that incident I had finished my morning coffee early so I wandered out to cross the farm track that had a footpath running down the middle of it. Something made me pause. By an upright stone pillar, just set back from the track, was a stable block that my late boss did DIY livery and there tucked around the corner was Butch. I was trying to get my head around what this bird was up to, so I decided to delay my jobs for a little while longer. I leant against the cornerstone pillar, looking around to see Butch with his neck craning around the corner of the tack room.
I looked up the track towards the entrance to see a cyclist starting to slowly peddle down the track, it did not dawn on me what evil intention this goose had in his mind until it was too late.
As the cyclist got level with Butch he appeared from the corner of the stable block honking, wings and neck outstretched. The unsuspecting cyclist was suddenly jolted back from some faraway place to be confronted by this vision of hell with feathers on. The poor cyclist had terror written across his face when he got level with me. With Butch in hot pursuit of the back tyre, last I saw of the cyclist and goose, was them disappearing around the corner at the bottom of the track.
I left my hiding place to go and retrieve something from the dairy, on my return there was Butch swaggering back up the track, I had visions of this cyclist with only one tyre on his bike. I was laughing so much that my boss had walk out to find where I had gone too, as he had been waiting for the piece of equipment that I had gone to fetch 15 minutes ago. My boss looked at me and wondered if I had one over the yardarm in my coffee.
It was a little while after that I got to witness this goose in the same evil mode. There up the top of the lane was a cyclist. I'm not sure if it was the same one. He seemed to be waiting for some type of divine intervention, and then he rose on one side of his peddle almost like he was waiting for the starter's gun to go off, and then he was peddling like crazy, as if his life depended on it, by the time he was level with the corner of the stable block he was motoring and yes in hot pursuit was Butch.
This time Butch only got halfway down the track before he gave the chase up but defiant to the last second, he came swaggering back up the track. Sometime later I came across one of the local walkers, apparently Butch had acquired a bit of a reputation locally. So cyclist be warned goose on the loose.
Comments