Part 8

Jack Miner did just that; and the next year he left the corn a little nearer the house and so on. Meanwhile he made a law that you couldn't come onto his place with a shotgun. He couldn't stop the townspeople from taking a shot at the small flocks as they passed over, from the farm feeding ground to the Lake, but the geese didn't seem to expect that of Jack. He says they would miss it, if the shooting stopped, and get stale; and then it does a similar lot for the town in the critical month of April.

Finally Jack built a large concrete pond on his house acres, leaving much corn on the clean marges. He has a strong heart to wait with. The geese "had him" when he first carried forth the corn, but it was a year or two afterward before a daring young gander and pair made a hasty drop. For once there was no chorus of "I-told-you-so's," from the wiser heads cocked stiff as cattails from the low growth of the surrounding fields. That was the second beginning.

The system has been cumulative ever since, and in something like this order: fifteen, forty, one hundred and fifty, four hundred, six hundred--in five years. The geese never land all at once in the artificial pond--some watching as far back as from the remote wood-lot, others in the south fields across the road. Jack Miner feeds five bushels of corn a day and would like to feed fifteen.

"A rich man can afford a few geese," he remarked, "but it takes a poor man to feed six hundred."

He asked the Canadian Government for one hundred dollars the year to help feed the geese, but the formidable process entailed to get it evidently dismayed Ottawa at the outset, for it didn't go through. An automobile magnate came over from the States recently. The substance of his call didn't leak out. In any event, Jack Miner is still managing his brick-kiln. Bird-fanciers come nowadays in season from all over the States and Provinces, and Jack feeds them too. Meantime, we Lake folk who come early enough to the Shore to see the inspiring flocks flying overland to the water in the beginnings of dusk, and hear them out on the Lake where they moor at night, a bedtime music that makes for strange dreaming--we know well what kind of a gift to the community Jack Miner is; and we are almost as sorry as he, when the keen, hardy Norse blood of the birds calls them forth from the May balm.

Of course, Jack is an individual. He has time to plant roses as well as corn. At luncheon to-day, there was an armful of red roses on the table from Jack Miner's. He had sent them three miles in hay time, and didn't know that I had spent the morning in writing about his geese. He has time to tempt thousands of smaller birds to his acreage. It's one seething bird-song there. Besides, he makes a fine brick. You'd expect him to be a workman.... But the wild geese are a part of his soul.

"I've watched them for a good many years now," he told me. "I've seen them tackle a man, a bull, a team, and stand against the swoop of an eagle. Two ganders may be hard as swordsmen at each other, when they're drawing off their flocks, but they'll stand back to back against any outsider. Yes, I've watched them a long time, and I've never yet seen them do anything a man would be ashamed of. Why, I'd like to see the wild goose on the back of the Canadian flag!"

I wondered if Canada were worthy, but didn't say so.

It is rather too fine an event to go often to Jack Miner's. The deeper impressions are those which count, and such are spontaneous. They do not come at call. One feels as if breaking into one of the natural mysteries--at first glimpse of the huge geese so near at hand--a spectacle of beauty and speed not to be forgotten. They are built long and clean. Unlike the larger fliers as a whole, they need little or no run to rise; it is enough to say that they rise from the water. You can calculate from that the marvellous strength of pinion. And they are continental wing-rangers that know the little roads of men, as they know the great lakes and waterways and mountain chains--Jack Miner's door-yard and Hudson's Bay.

"I'd give a lot to see one right close, Jack," said I.

"You don't have to. Come on."

He took me to a little enclosure where a one-winged gander was held.

"He came home to me with a wing broken one Sunday," said Jack. "It was heavy going, but he managed to get here. I thought at first we'd have some goose, but we didn't. The fact is, I was sort of proud that he came home in his trouble. I took the wing off, as you see. He's doing fine, but he tried to drink himself to death, as they all do. That appears to be the way they fix a broken wing. It may be the fever or the pain; anyway, they'll drink until they die. I kept this fellow dry, until he healed."

The splendid gamester stretched out his black head and hissed at me--something liquid and venomous in the sound--the long black beak as fine and polished as a case for a girl's penknife. He was game to the core and wild as ever.... Jack hadn't let him die--perhaps he felt out of the law because of that.

"I'll go and do my chores," Jack Miner said. "You can stay and think it out."

I knew from that how well he understood the same big thing out of the past which the wild bird meant to me. He had the excellent delicacy which comes from experience, to leave me there alone.

An hysterical gabble broke the contemplation. Waddling up from behind was a tame goose. The shocking thing was too fat and slow to keep itself clean--its head snubbed, its voice crazily pitched, its wings gone back to a rudiment, its huge food-apparatus sagging to the ground, straining to lay itself against the earth, like a billiard-ball in a stocking full of feathers.

And before me was the Magnificent, one that had made his continental flights, fasting for them, as saints fast in aspiration--lean and long, powerful and fine in brain and beak and wing--an admirable adversary, an antagonist worthy of eagles, ready for death rather than for captivity.... All that Gibbon ever wrote stood between this game bird and its obscene relative dragging its liver about a barnyard--the rise and fall of the Roman, and every other human and natural, empire--the rise by toil and penury and aspiration, and the fall to earth again in the mocking ruins of plenty....

Good Jack Miner expressed the same, but in his own way, when he came back from the chores.

WORKMANSHIP

As related, I had seen the Lake-front property first in August. The hollows were idealised into sunken gardens, while the mason was building the stone study. We returned in April--and the bluff was like a string of lakes. The garden in the rear had been ploughed wrong. Rows of asparagus were lanes of still water, the roots cut off from their supply of air. Moreover, the frogs commented in concert upon our comings and goings.... I set about the salvage alone, and as I worked thoughts came. Do you know the suction of clay--the weight of adhering clay to a shovel? You can lift a stone and drop it, but the substance goes out of a city man's nerve when he lifts a shovel of clay and finds it united in a stubborn bond with the implement. I went back to the typewriter, and tried to keep up with the gang of ditchers who came and tiled the entire piece. It was like healing the sick to see the water go off, but a bad day for the frogs in the ponds where the bricks had been made.

"You'll be surprised at the change in the land which this tiling will make in one season," the boss told me. "It will turn over next corn-planting time like a heap of ashes."

That's the general remark. Good land turns over like a heap of ashes.

I would hardly dare to tell how I enjoyed working in that silent cave of red firelight. Matters of craftsmanship were continually in my thoughts--especially the need in every human heart of producing something. Before the zest is utterly drained by popular din from that word "efficiency," be reminded that the good old word originally had to do with workmanship and not with dollar-piling.... The world is crowded with bad workmen. Much of its misery and cruelty is the result of bad workmanship, which in its turn results from the lack of imagination. A man builds his character in his work; through character alone is the stamina furnished to withstand with dignity the heavy pressures of life.

... I arranged with a neighbour to do some work for me. In fact he asked for the work, and promised to come the next Tuesday. He did not appear. Toward the end of the week following I passed him in the lane that leads down to the Lake--a tall, tired man, sitting beside a huge stone, his back against a Lombard poplar, a shotgun across his knees.

"I thought I'd wait here, and see if I couldn't hit one of them geese," he explained, as I came up.

It seemed I had never seen such a tired face. His eyes were burning like the eyes of a sentry, long unrelieved, at the outpost of a city.... The geese ride at mooring out in the Lake at night. I have fallen asleep listening to their talk far out in the dark. But I have never seen them fly overland before sunset, which was two hours away at the time I passed up the lane. I do not know how long Monte had been sitting there.

Now except for the triviality of the promise, I had no objection to his not working for me, and no objection to his feeding his family, thus first-handed, though very little breast of the game wild goose comes to the board of such as he.... I was on the way to the forge of a workman. I wanted a knocker for an oaken door; and I wanted it just so. Moreover, I knew the man who would make it for me.