One of the most revered and most welcome of all seasons is here with the arrival of the first goose brave enough to venture past that suspicious looking plastic decoy. The first goose of spring usually signals the primal instinct in all of us and goes off like an itchy trigger finger that needs a good scratching after many moons of hibernation.
Yup, it’s springtime, folks, so get out that canoe and strap it on the first long sled you see and head out to your hunting grounds ‘cause spring don’t last long enough these days. For some strange reason, spring time revolves around an anticipated forecast determined at least a year in advance by the local school committee and lasts an average two weeks. I can imagine those poor working Crees in the south salivating at all those farm geese and the ganders that roam the park downtown. Pity. Geese taste better when they’re cooked in a meechuwap and smoked with the aroma of salt dried wood picked from the shores of James Bay. Double pity.
I hear rumblings from south of the border that spring time goose hunting may soon become a reality and perhaps those southern folks will lobby hard enough to get this hunt going again. I have a faint suspicion that the reason why we don’t see so many geese flying north is that they don’t get shot at in those corn fields and tend to hang around all year long. So you country bumpkins in the deep south, take out those useless steel shot shells and scare off those geese that are eating all your corn and make those huge flocks head north where they can be appreciated on my tabletop.
I was once a contender for the Trivial Pursuit Championship and one question which I failed to answer correctly was “Do geese fly in the rain?” That really got me in a tizzy when I got that one wrong and really blew my chances for the national title as trivial grand master.
(Not!). So do they or don’t they? That is the question that fueled many a dispute when one peeked out the tent door in the wee hours of the morning and saw the drizzle of a spring shower. Go out and sleep in the blind or stay in bed and await the first honk of a goose? You tell me.
Another not so joyful event that comes with this season is the spring clean-up. It’s amazing what you can find under your bed or deep in your closet. So there’s those thick warm socks I’ve been reserving for the minus forty’s. Might as well chuck them back in the closet for next winter. Hey, what’s this huge dust ball covering up? Oh no, it’s the missing rez notes I promised to send on time, way ahead of the deadline. Is Will Nicholls going to torture me on his grill for that? Or can I recycle old material? Save the environment I say and send this one in. I’ll be back… in two weeks with a sun scarred face and smelling like swill. Ta da…
