A Tune Full of Terror

Now by the altar,/Over the victim,/Ripe for our ritual,/Sing this enchantment:/A song without music,/A sword in the senses,/A Storm in the heart/And a fire in the brain;/A clamor of Furies/To paralyse reason,/A tune full of terror,/A drought in the soul! 

- Aeschylus, The Eumenides trans. Vellacott

What started out as a minor inconvenience one spring soon developed into a battle of the wills, a testing of patience, and a seemingly endless game of cat and mouse on par with the great chases and chess games of recent myth and lore. This eternal struggle was matched only by the highest of the genre: Poseidon and Odysseus, Juno and Aeneas, Arthur and Mordred, Holmes and Moriarty, Amadeus and Salieri, Batman and The Joker, Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, Mr. Bean and the 3-wheeled car. I am of course, referring to the episode of Aaron Arnold and the Liberal Presbyterian Wesleyan-Baptist Canadian Geese.

This struggle for territorial dominance began innocently enough. The geese made their presence known in the usually goosey methods: Valkyrie-esque cries from above and remnants from previous meals from below. The task was simple: scare them away; for Canadian Geese are protected by federal law and to terminate their existence would be a crime punishable by woes unheard of. The method of frightening worked for a few days as our hero was alerted to their presence on campus and would divert his current work path to engage with the foul fowl. Time and time again they flew away their cries echoing over hill and dale. One might suspect that these were the bitter cries of defeat, but in reality these were the stinging curses that only geese in all their malice and hatred can utter.

The ante was upped and the geese began to nest in the vicinity of the daycare children, threatening the young and all that was good while claiming the maintenance shed for themselves. A permit was obtained from the federal government to dispose of the nest. While demolishing this den of iniquity, pieces of the infernal Malebolge were hurled at the transcontinental transgressors while the spawn of the devil birds was discovered, quietly anticipating the coming time that they would unleash their unmatched horrors upon an unsuspecting and unprepared world.

Our hero, armed with a broom and a permit from the federal government, disarmed the Geese’s stronghold of sin and abducted the encased embryos of potential evil. Then, away from innocent eyes, he performed the rite usually reserved for the first step in the ritual commonly referred to as “Saturday Breakfast.”

The honks of the unformed echoed silently across campus and into the ears of the progenitors  of perfidy who, having lost hearth, home, and the maintenance shed, vowed unrelenting vengeance upon their accuser, judge, and embryo Lord High egg-secutioner. 

The honks became more threatening. Their droppings, more obscene. Their presence, more ominous. Children, scared for their lives, heard the terrible webbed feet of the bestial Branta canadensis beating thunderously on the light metal roof above spelling out and weaving a nest of doom and despair for all. The geese summoned the Secret Four which joined them on their daily perfidious perambulations rendering chase on foot useless and ineffective, echoing the parable of unclean spirits leaving and returning. These geese could only be driven out by pursuit via golf kart.

Day in and day out, our hero mounted his mostly-untrusty steed, named Rozinante by those who knew her best, and gave chase to the wicked for whom there was no rest.

Then, one Wednesday in May as Youth Group was about to begin, our hero and his comrade-in-arms mounted Rozinante and gave chase to their quarry onto the Wesleyan shores. Fear was finally struck into the heart of the fowl, like a well-aimed shaft from a master bowmen. The geese took flight and all traces of these despicable debasers of all that is good disappeared like the morning dew upon greeting the sun in its triumphant glory.

And so it was that evil was purged from the land… only to return haughtily and mockingly a year later. Thus, venator est venatus, and all the efforts of the heroic were deemed Sisyphean at best, and a recurrence of Ragnarok at worst. Will this psychotic symphony of violence ever resolve? Or will this cadenza of chaos forever improvise upon the beats and measures of time?