While I was looking them over, Tom and Addison appeared on the shore.
They had waked and missed me, but, hearing the gander, had guessed that
I had gone to the pond. Both were astonished and could hardly believe
their eyes till they came out where I stood and tried to lift the geese.
"We shall have to chop them out with the axe!" Tom exclaimed. "By jingo,
boys, here's goose feathers enough to make two feather beds and pillows
to boot."
The gander, still squalling, circled over us again.
"The old fellow feels bad," Addison remarked. "He has lost his whole big
family."
We decided that the geese on their way north had been out in the
rainstorm, and that when the weather cleared and turned cold so
suddenly, with snow squalls, they had become bewildered, perhaps, and
had descended on the pond. The cold wave was so sharp that, being quite
without food, they had frozen into the ice and perished there.
"Well, old boy," Tom said, addressing the gander that now stood flapping
his wings at us a few hundred feet away, "you've lost your women-folks.
We may as well have them as the bobcats."
He fetched the axe, and we cut away the ice round the geese and then
carried six loads of them down to camp.
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