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The Present

The old goose found the present at Walden Pond. The flock had flown all day, and all the night before, and all the day before that, migrating from their summer breeding grounds at Hudson Bay. Tired and hungry, they dropped to the still evening surface of the pond, splashing down in great foaming sprays of water, squawking at the tops of their lungs, a-wark, a-wark! Then, drifting silently like a majestic fleet of ships, they moved in the direction of the southern shore.

All but the old goose. Turning away, he paddled by himself to a sheltered cove on the other side of the pond, heading for a place he remembered from years gone by, a place where acorns were scattered thickly on the ground.

And then he saw the present.

It was bobbing in the shallows, floating in the water, bumping the alder stems, nudged by empty beer cans, brushed by downy pinfeathers that had scudded across the pond.

It was a bright object, moving up and down in the small lapping waves, glowing by itself in the dusky air.

The old goose had never seen anything like it. journeying south, year after year, gazing down at the landscape streaming away below him, he had sometimes seen the Atlantic Ocean alight with glowing sea creatures. But they were not like this.

Carefully the old goose picked the thing up in his beak and carried it ashore. Then, waddling slowly up the steep wooded slope, he found the place he remembered, where ten stone posts stood erect in a shadowy clearing.

The thing was a present.

Something solemn and compelling in the air of the quiet clearing seemed to speak to him, to tell him that. It was a present, and hemust give it to someone.

The old goose shuffled with his webbed feet in the dry leaves beside one of the stone posts, making a hollow place like a nest. Dropping the present into it, he covered the glowing surface with another thick layer of leaves. Then he waddled slowly back to the water, turning the matter over in his mind.

He must give the present to someone. Not just anybody. Oh, no! It was too good for just anybody. He must give it to someone who would understand how precious it was. Someone who would take good care of it. But who? That was the question.

Georgie was reading a book on the landing of the front-hall stairs. The window on the landing was open. She looked up to see the wind tossing the branches of the big tree outside.

If one, leaf touches another leaf, thought Georgie, it doesn't make any noise at all. But when all the leaves touch each other, the tree whispers all over.

Then she saw the big birds in the sky. They were flying over the tree, making a loud noise, a-WARK, a-WARK!

Oh, swans! thought Georgie.

She jumped up and watched the swans fly in a ragged line over the house. They were not white like swans in a book. They were white and gray and black. They were flying so low over the tree Georgie could hear the sound of the air flowing through their feathers. It made a soft noise, sssh, sssh, sssh.

If only I could fly like that, thought Georgie. If only I could do it again.

Because she had done it. She had. She knew she had. She had waked up in the middle of the night. She hadjumped down the stairs in two great floating bounds.

Unless it was only a dream.

Georgie turned around on the landing and looked at the twelve stairs falling steeply to the downstairs hall. Below her the bronze lady stood on the newel-post, gazing as usual out the front door, holding her light fixture in one upraised hand. Her light was turned off. The hall was dark.

Only the white marble head of Henry Thoreau glimmered in the watery gloom. Henry was a statue in the curve of the stairs, a carved bust on a tall stand. Everything else in the front hall was nearly invisible in the murky shade of the downstairs, but through the oval glass of the door Georgie could see a piece of the front yard.

The sun was shining brilliantly on the green grass beyond the porch, and on scraps of long legs and big feet and shorts and skirts and blue jeans. Georgie's mother and Uncle Freddy were teaching a Saturday morning class in the front yard. Teachers and students were sitting in a circle on the grass. It was Uncle Freddy's school. Georgie's mother and Uncle Freddy had a school, right here in the house, and in the front yard and the backyard, and sometimes they even held classes way up in the branches of the apple tree. It was a college, really, with a funny name: The Concord College of Transcendental Knowledge.

This year they were studying a book by Henry Thoreau, who had lived in Concord, Massachusetts, down the road at Walden Pond, a long time ago.

Uncle Freddy liked to pretend Mr. Thoreau wasn't dead. He called him Henry, as if he were an old friend.