BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN

I was down in Cornwall for the Coronation bank holiday. I was getting to grips with court papers. Let’s not go there – some of you may know why. I spent the following Tuesday – and half of Wednesday – getting cross-examined. The peace of a holiday home perched on top of a cliff above a beach turned out to be a fine place to sit alone with just files and papers as company.

On the Friday evening I heard a kerfuffle on the beach below, so I stood up and peered over the cliff edge to see what was afoot. And there I saw a couple of families shouting at a pair of Canada geese who seemed to be paddling away from the beach and out to sea. When I looked closer I spotted their tiny gosling caught in the crashing waves. The gosling was getting thrown repeatedly onto the rocks just off the beach. It was neither strong enough to escape the waves nor old enough to fly away.

We were witnessing the death of a sweet, fluffy gosling – helpless and innocent. All were moved.

Then one brave teenager waded out into the sea. It was a windy evening, and she was getting blown all over the place as she made her way out and across slippery rocks. Still, she managed to catch the gosling in her hands and successfully made it back to the shore, to a round of applause from those on the beach. The gosling seemed alive.

By this stage the parents – the two Canada geese who were heading away from shore – were quite a way away. But the girl, buoyed by the clapping from the crowd, was not done yet. She ran as fast as she could off the beach and up onto a long jetty which would take her nearer to the parent geese.

The gathering crowd followed her as quickly as they could.

When the girl reached the end of the jetty she called out to the departing parents. But they did not seem to give much of a damn. Either they had not noticed their missing gosling, had thought it crushed on the rocks in the waves or deemed it ripe for independence.

“Throw it in the water,” I could hear some calling.

“Come back, we have your baby,” a lady with pink hair screamed, seemingly shocked that the two geese were leaving their fluffy baby behind.

The girl seemed unsure what to do.

Eventually she threw the gosling into the sea, hoping it might catch up with its parents or call out to them in goosespeak so they returned. I feared then that the exhausted gosling had merely been removed from the frying pan and dumped in the fire.

I did not see what happened next. The fate of the bird was obscured from me by the jetty and the crowd. Anyway, I was forced to retire inside as the wind was threatening to blow my further witness statement across the terrace and into the harbour.

Later that evening I popped down the hill and into one of the village pubs for a pint of cider, much deserved. I learnt from the harbourmaster, who was sat at the bar and yet stouter with ale, that the gosling had drowned.

“I mean what were they thinking?” he laughed. “Throwing the little blighter into the sea! They even named her Cordelia!”

I was in a pensive mood as I sipped my pint.

I thought about the gosling and its cruel (or indifferent) parents. I thought too of the poor girl who was cheered one minute for her heroism then lost it all so soon after – her victory fast reduced to Pyrrhic.

I know that years of anthropomorphising have left too many oblivious to the ruthlessness of Mother Nature. Disney should take much of the blame for that. Many have sought to accuse our fellow man when Nature shows her true colours as who else can they blame for the world’s ills?

As for the girl, I would have been tempted to do the same. Maybe I should have sailed her out to the parents but by the time we’d got going they would likely have flown away.  

I reckoned that the solution to our current softness must be education. Maybe Nature has some lessons in store for us akin to how the doomscultists preach – such practical lessons may wake us up to life as our forebears knew it.

To refute that Nature is savage is like rejecting the fact that blood is red, or that fire will burn.

But is she savage or just indifferent?

There can be little doubt.

On this, for once, I am with Richard Dawkins who hit the nail on the head almost thirty years ago when he wrote: 

“Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”
_{Richard Dawkins (1995). “River out of Eden: A Darwinian view of life”}

Amen.

Thanks for life’s lesson, Cordelia.

Dominic Wightman is Editor of Country Squire Magazine.