Evenings in Bali are meant to be tranquil and dreamy, touched with the fragrance of jasmine. I tried to remember this as I dodged through my dark, wet garden with a sick goose under my arm. The fragrance was decidedly not floral.
Rosalind the goose came late to motherhood. Her other siblings were raising their second batch of chicks while she was still puzzling over how to lay her first egg. Once she got the knack of it, though, she couldn’t find the ‘off’ switch. Even after two charming balls of yellow fluff appeared, she continued to lay one huge egg after the other. Perhaps the constant presence of her amorous spouse over-stimulated her.
Now, a goose appears to be a bird of dignity and deep intellectual insights. This is a façade; there is not much going on in a goose’s thinking box. Also, the Bali goose is singularly lacking in family feeling. From the day the chicks appeared their parents completely ignored them, except for knocking them out of their way at feeding time. They just kept making more babies without paying any attention to the ones they had.
Rosalind stopped eating as soon as she began to lay the first clutch. For weeks she rarely appeared at the feeder and was getting very thin. One morning I noticed that she was sitting in the mud and by the end of the day she still hadn’t moved. Then it occurred to me that she had been laying eggs and starving for over two months. She probably had so little calcium left in her body that she was too weak to stand. Don, our Ubud-based bird expert, agreed with my diagnosis and came to catch her.
As a child I’d been terrorized by my grandfather’s hissing geese, which used to chase me around the farmhouse and corner me in the orchard until I hollered for rescue. Bali geese are very polite in comparison. Although they make a lot of noise, they don’t peck. We caught Rosalind and deposited her in a spare aviary, bedded down in rice husks, then poured nourishing concoctions down her long throat.
She was pathetically thin, her breastbone as sharp as a knife, and too weak to stand. Geese are foragers and would normally live on tender grass and weeds. But in the compound where Rosalind and Richard grew up (we will draw a veil over their relationship to one another) everybody ate white rice -- the Balinese, the dogs, the geese and the roosters. Grass and weeds contain calcium; rice does not. But Rosalind had turned up her beak at greens and had to be trained to eat them now.
Six times a day I mixed fresh chopped kangkung with corn, bean sprouts, red rice, calcium supplements and honey in rain water. She nibbled on this and slept a lot. Every few days she’d lay another egg. The last one weighed 200 grams, the equivalent of delivering a 10 kg baby. I sent it home with Wayan who later reported that, when scrambled, it fed the family.
After a week of intensive care Rosalind looked pretty dingy, but was able to stand up for a few minutes at a time. I thought she would benefit from spending some time in the little pond in the front garden, where she could preen herself and do other gooselike things in the water. She leapt into the shallow pond happily and began to bob around. Nearing dark I went out to check and she was still in the water. I had been remiss. She wasn’t strong enough to get out of the pond, and was shivering in the cold water. I caught her and put her back in ICU, and ran to call Don. Hyperthermia was dangerous, he told me. Bring the goose into the house, warm her up any way you can and get some food into her, fast.
By now it was dark and rainy. I tried not to think of pit vipers, which have the run of the garden after dark, as I made my way to the aviary. Rosalind was huddled shivering near the back wall and I crawled in and grabbed her. The rain poured down on both of us as I splashed back to the house through the mud with the goose under my arm.
She regarded me bleakly as I toweled her dry but was surprisingly tolerant of the hair dryer. Nested down on a pile of newspaper in the shower, she finally stopped shivering. When presented with a bowl of warm chopped greens, corn and honey, she consented to eat. The next morning I was almost afraid to get out of bed in case she hadn’t made it through the night. But the goose was standing up and the food bowl was empty. Her smoky blue eyes were bright and enquiring.
However, my shower would never be the same. Whoever coined the phrase ‘loose as a goose’ certainly knew his waterfowl. Rosalind’s misadventures had not resulted in constipation. The volume and projectile nature of delivery were particularly noteworthy. I decided that she was well enough to go back to ICU – besides, I had to clean up the mess before Wayan arrived.
The goose was getting used to being carried around and settled comfortably on my hip. But gentle reader, I warn you never to carry a sick goose through the house without first wrapping it securely in a towel. Given the state of my shower I wouldn’t have thought there could be anything left in her digestive tract. This was a grave error. We were almost at the front door when Rosalind delivered one final, high velocity reminder of her visit directly onto the CD player and rack.
As I write, Rosalind is plump and strong and almost ready to rejoin her family. But I’m rethinking a career as a goose farmer. There’s too much drama, and I miss the fragrance of jasmine.
