Spring is a beautiful time where I live.  The grass is green.  The flowers are out.  The temperatures are moderate.  And the geese are plentiful.  If you’re a Canadian goose, why spend all of your life and energy flapping your wings in a desperate attempt to get from place to place when you can winter over in a place such as North Carolina?  Raleigh is filled with them, and they leave plenty of evidence behind such as goose poo.

Now, nesting time is upon us.  There’s a nest across the major road from where we live.  And where there’s nests, there’s geese.  Now, I’m not sure if the goose I encountered tonight was the dad/mom belonging to said nest.  All I know is that the pups and I were coming back from a long, long walk.  We were tired, hungry, and simply wanting to get back before it was too dark.

Until we met The Goose.

Now, The Goose was sitting in the utility strip between the road and the sidewalk as if he didn’t have a care in the world.  Problem was, The Goose was essentially blocking our way.  There wasn’t a good way around him.  It was either go out into the street where we’d get hit or way into the grass, which was wet from a recent storm.

The Goose saw us.  Stood up.  Started sticking his tongue out, hissing at us, and bobbing his head up and down in typical goose aggression style.  It would have been comical had I not known from experience that if a goose bites you, it hurts!

Then Wallace goes bananas.  Keep in mind that The Goose is as big as he was, meaning that he was bigger (and nastier) than Wallace.  Then he started acting like he was going to charge use.  All I could see in my mind is the goose charging, nipping Wallace, and Wallace, gentle boy that he is, biting back.  It would have been an all-out bloodbath that Wallace would probably win.

I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, even The Goose.  So I did what I thought I needed to.  I jumped.  Landed loudly on both of my feet.  Sounded like splat!  The Goose jumped, so I did it again.  Then I started trying to edge past.

We repeated the whole thing.  Finally, we managed to worm by him.  But as we were vacating the area (and quickly, I might add), he came after us again!  So I used the jump/splat technique once more.  Finally, success!  The Goose left us alone, and we were on our merry way home to dine, thankful that-at least today, we were safely out of goosing range.