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By GERALD S. HAWKINS
Rappahannock Newg Contributing Writer
My wife, Julia, and I wanted to raise geese on the farm. It has five branches with year-round water, and good green grass in the meadows. Enough for quite a flock.
After a long search, we found a farmer with a flock of Emden geese — white, plump and nonflying.
The farmer explained how it was not easy to tell the sex of young geese, but he pointed out two goslings in the field that he said were a good bet for being male and female. Because they had been hatched out late in the summer under a broody * chicken, and the pedigree geese would have nothing to do with them, they had moved in with a ' flock of sheep. »
The two goslings seemed to remember this bonding, because for a while back at our own farm, they would come over when someone joked t and said “Baa.” As they grew bigger on lush grass land corn, one gosling developed a fat paunch, or £*keel” — it was a goose; the other hissed and attacked with head down lowr — it was a gander. Jurpa named them Adam and Eve. K Unfortunately, before a year has passed disaster struck. The goose died of a malady that neither the agricultural extension office nor professors at the University of Maryland could diagnose.
Our hopes for a dynasty were dashed.
Adam, the gander, acted up. He goosed people, including me, and attacked with sharp beak Sind thrashing wings. Yet he climbed on Julia’s lap pike a soft, overgrown kitten. £ Geese take two or three years to mature, so Inhere was still time to find Adam a mate. We went back to the farmer who raised geese. As luck would have it, another goose had been pushed out of the flock, and was sitting in the sheep pen on eggs of unknown origin that would never hatch. Apparently she was one goose too many for the ganders.
We arranged to take her with the nest and eggs back to the farm. We thought the nest might give her security, and the eggs might give Adam ideas. * Moving two goslings in a station wagon had been as easy as duck soup. But a large goose was
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