Remembering Atticus

I was very saddened today to get an email from my mother telling me that our goose Atticus had died over the weekend. We estimate that Atticus was eight or nine years old. I've read that geese can be expected to live 20 years but also heard that Atticus had reached a ripe old age. I'm not sure which is right, but either way, it wasn't long enough.

 Atticus came to us in a strange way. Eight or nine years ago, I was home alone on a summer's day. I was went out to the backyard to enjoy the sun and found, to my great surprise, that there was a small, fuzzy bird in our swimming pool. It was paddling around in circles and peeping. I called my mom, and she suggested that I call a vet to figure out what to do. I called two vets and was also referred to a wildlife agency. No one was seemed totally sure what to say, but everyone seemed to agree that I should get it out of the pool before it got exhausted and drowned. My mom said she'd head home with a cat carrier. So I headed to the pool with a net and scooped. To my surprise, the bird took one look at the descending basket and dove. It swam around the bottom of the pool for a while before coming up for air. Hmmm. I tried a few more times but got the same result, and I couldn't move my basket through the water as fast as he could swim.

I was starting to get quite worried when I heard a car pull up in the driveway. Moments later, my brother David and several of his friends came into the backyard. They'd finished a morning water polo practice and were still in bathing suits. Excellent. I explained the problem, and Casey immediately hopped into the water. The bird dove again, but he was no match for Casey, who simply dove after him and emerged moments later with a very wet and unhappy bird help gently in his hands. I was reminded of the scene in The Story of Ping when Ping is pulled from the water by a little boy with a barrel tied to his back for flotation.

My mom arrived home soon after, and we installed the bird in the cat carrier with water and bread. It was clearly not a duck, as its neck was too long. We concluded that it was either a swan or a goose, but since cygnets are grey and this little fuzzball was yellow we figured it was probably a goose. A search through the neighborhood proved fruitless; no one was missing a gosling. And so we named him - I can't remember where the name Atticus came from - and put him into the pen with our goat. We were never sure whether Atticus was actually male, but it seemed like such a good name we decided to assume he was.

As Atticus grew, he confirmed that he was indeed a goose. His fluff was replaced by snowy white feathers, and his beak developed a large knob where it met his forehead. My brother some internet research and says this meant he was a Chinese goose. Atticus never learned to fly, apparently having missed that important developmental stage, and never really liked the water, possibly due to trauma from the pool incident. Overall, he turned out to be great pet. For one thing, he ate the same kind of food that our goat ate, so feeding was easy. For another, he honked the moment a car turned up our drive, alerting us even before the dog noticed that someone had arrived. He did, however, go through a rather mean phase, biting anyone who ventured into the pen. One summer, though, that all changed.

I can't remember whether my mom and I arrived home that afternoon together, or just very close to the same time. I noticed immediately that something was wrong with Atticus; instead of honking to announce our arrival, he was eerily quiet. He didn't waddle over to the fence to say hello, either. Instead, he was sitting in the sun and seemed barely able to lift his head. My mom and I rushed into the pen and he still didn't get up, though he tried feebly. We brought him a bucket of water and he drank for a whole minute without stopping. The water seemed to have revived him, but though he looked perkier he still did not stand. My mom lifted him up, something he'd never let us do before, and I saw that one of his feet flapped and paddled the air while the other was curled up and seemed immobile. Not sure what else to do, we dragged a tub to a shady corner of the pen, filled it with water, and set him into it. He seemed much happier and was able to paddle around. At dinnertime, we brought him his food and he ate from the tub. I stroked his unbelievably soft feathers while he ate. To this day, I have no idea what caused his foot to stop working, but the morning he was waddling around the pen as if nothing had happened. Both his foot and his disposition seemed to have mended, because he was generally very gentle after that. His foot seized up once more that summer, but a bit of time in the tub and he was back in action again.

Atticus impresses his roommate.

Atticus continued to thrive with only a few incidents of note. Our dog Daisy loved to bark at him, and once she managed to get her muzzle through the fence just as he was thrusting his head out at her and bit his beak. He bled, but seemed to recover well. I loved to watch him flap his wings, stretching them out to their full length and beating them back and forth before settling them at his sides. And when he drank he would dip his beak into the trough, sip some water, then lift his head as high as it would go to allow the water to slide down his long throat.



Then, about two weeks ago, my mom emailed me to say that Atticus seemed to be slowing down. His vibrant orange beak was beginning to fade, and the neat rim of orange around each of his eyes was practically indistinguishable from his white feathers. He took his first trip to the vet to have an abscess on his foot drained and had to spend more time paddling around in the tub for "rehab" after his surgery. He seemed to be doing fine for a while, but the woman who came to feed our animals while my parents were away for the weekend found him on Friday morning, lying in the pen with his head resting on his back, just the way he used to sleep. She said he looked very peaceful.


I will really miss Atticus the next time I go home. The pen will seem quiet and empty without him there, and I'm sure Henrietta, the goat, will be lonely without him. She still has a few chickens for company, but she and Atticus lived together for years, and really seemed to get along well. (Once, we had to clip Henrietta's hooves, which involved putting a pillowcase over her head and laying her on her back. She was relatively calm once her eyes were covered, but Atticus was distraught and kept waddling around us in circles, honking in indignation and trying to peck us.) Funny how the pet we never intended to have ended up being one of my favorites.