The wind beneath their wings

 

I was once stopped in my tracks, caught by the cacophony of a crowd I could not see, could not even imagine. It sounded like opening day at the Cardinal's Busch stadium.

But I was seventeen miles out in the middle of nowhere! It was that far just to find the grocery store. If I wanted to see a movie it was a seventy mile round trip. Thirty five miles each way!

Stepping out my back door I saw the fields around me alive with geese. Canadian geese, snow geese, I don't know all the kinds or names, but they were everywhere! 

Including the sky! I stood on the edge of that field for over twenty minutes as layer after layer of geese flew over me, honking. Some of them actually did fly so low I could feel the wind beneath their wings.

This is the way the world must have looked before we began taking over. I've never seen so many animals in the wild before or since.  

And then, suddenly a truck appeared and men got out. They raised their rifles and began shooting those birds! It was the farmer who owned the land. I guess he was within his rights, but they fell like small angels from the sky, their wings bloody and broken, their voices silenced forever.

It was the single most beautiful thing I have ever experienced, but it was also the most heart breakingly awful thing I ever watched.