Wild Goose (Novel Excerpt)

	...
	
	I had to ask myself just what I thought I was looking for?

	It soon became obvious that I needed to discredit the current rage 
and all the new-fangled scholarly interpretations.  For one thing, the 
idea that this recklessly flapping bird was some kind of a space traveler 
is completely misleading.  She may have had a lovely song and an ear for a 
good tune, but in 1163, such a thing as an astronaut had never been known 
in all of Christendom.  There might have been a troubadour or two, and some 
people even may have enjoyed hunting with falcons, but in my opinion, this 
particular bird was no predator.  I wonder what it is about her that 
arouses so much fervor?   There may have come a particularly dull day when 
our feathered friend slipped out of the back doors of a castle, gliding past 
some flower gardens and over a moat, not stopping until she flew well beyond 
a certain favorite meadow stream.  Though such shamanic speculations are well 
beyond the average person's ability to comprehend or anticipate, this very 
same bird, on a different day, might well have discovered herself knotted 
quite fixedly among the skeins of what might have turned out to be a rather 
important flock of geese.  Or perhaps it was a tapestry?

	You may as well hear the truth:  the hunt for this bird was starting 
to make me feel trapped.  It is horrible to feel oneself caught up in someone 
else's mind or machinations, as though placating some orthodoxy.  She might 
have been the most fearsome brute in some Medieval bestiary, but I began to 
suspect that she could not speak.