The Year the Goose Didn't Come

A tale of what happened after the famous thing: being the Goose Tournament, the year the undefeated Goose failed to appear, and what a town does with a race it can no longer lose. Builds on the Goose (`chosen-futility`) and the realm's truest saying — the only one you compete with in Sogmarsh is yourself.

For as long as anyone could prove, the Goose Tournament had one certainty at its heart, and that was the Goose. You entered the Tournament — the running, the root-judging, the singing, the wrestling, the general contesting of a green in the Short — not to win, for you could not win; you entered to come second to the Goose. The Goose was undefeated. The Goose had always been undefeated. No soul in the memory of the realm had beaten the Goose at anything the Goose chose to be judged in, which was everything, for the Goose was entered by long custom in every event and placed first in all of them; and there was a rosette for the Goose, and a rosette for nobody, and nothing whatever in between. You went home second-best, and content — for to come second to the Goose was the natural and honourable condition of a person, and the Goose asked nothing of you but that you try, and fail, and try again next Short.

And then one year the Goose did not come.

Its coop, which was Mr Pottle's to keep — Pottle being the parish's most persistently employed incompetent, and Goosekeeper by the same logic that had made him a ferryman where there was no crossing — its coop, that Short, was simply empty. Nobody had seen the Goose die. Nobody had seen it leave. It was an old goose, granted, and geese do not last forever; but it was not there, and Pottle, who had fed it every day of his adult life and been bitten for his trouble, could only stand by the empty coop with the feed still in his hand and say that the Goose had, he supposed, gone. Whether it had died, or wandered, or simply won so completely and for so long that it had retired undefeated into legend, no one could say, and everyone, in the end, decided.

Here is what happened after.

Within a few short years the Goose was misremembered. The children were taught that the Goose had been enormous — ten feet at the shoulder, black-eyed, ferocious, a terror of the green. The old ones, who recalled a smallish, bad-tempered, entirely ordinary grey goose, said so, and were not believed; and the Goose grew in the telling, Short on Short, exactly as a man grows on the grinder's round, until the Goose the children feared and the Goose the elders remembered were plainly two different birds, and only one of them had ever existed.

It was commercialised, a little, as these things are: the press that prints the Frost Fair began to sell The Legendary Goose, fiercer and larger with each edition; and a man set up on the green selling rosettes to those who had come second to a Goose that was no longer there.

It was disputed by witnesses. For there is one man — everyone knows which — who holds, and has always held, that his grandfather once beat the Goose, at the singing, in a year he cannot quite fix; and he is universally disbelieved, and universally cherished, because a town needs exactly one man who claims the impossible thing, and defends him fiercely against the doubt of strangers while doubting him themselves.

And it was, in one respect, never repaired at all — which was the real trouble, and took the town a while to see. For without the Goose, the Tournament had no one to lose to. And that meant that the people of the green, for the first time in the memory of the realm, might have to compete with each other. And that the realm cannot bear. Because the whole quiet genius of the Goose had been this: the only one you ever competed with in Sogmarsh was yourself, and the Goose was the pleasant fiction that let you. You cannot beat the Goose; no one beats the Goose; therefore no one is beaten by his neighbour, and everyone is beaten only by the Goose — which is to say by the impossible, which is to say by no one at all — and goes home second, and fond of the whole green. Take the Goose away, and you are left with winners and losers, which is a Murkminster idea, and a cold one, and no way to spend a Short.

So the town did the only Sogmarsh thing. Without a meeting, without a vote, without a decision anyone could ever afterward point to, it kept the Goose. It was agreed — by no one, by everyone — that the Goose remained undefeated in perpetuity; that the first rosette was the Goose's forever; and that a new goose, a perfectly ordinary bad-tempered grey goose that somebody's aunt had going spare, would be quietly installed in Mr Pottle's coop as "the Goose." And no one — no one — admits it is a different goose. Because the Goose was never a goose. The Goose is a principle: the thing you cannot beat, that keeps you racing only against yourself; and it does not matter in the least which bad-tempered bird is standing in for the impossible this year.

And this Short, a small child ran the fastest a child has ever run on that green, and so nearly — so nearly — beat the Goose (the Goose being, after all, a goose, and slow) that Mr Pottle had to step it smartly across the line at the last; and the child was told, gravely, before the whole green, that they had come a magnificent second, the finest second in living memory — and given a rosette-for-nobody with the child's own name inked on the back, where the grown ones could not see — and went home glowing, and undefeated in spirit, and racing, ever after, against no one on earth but themselves.

Which is the whole of the point, and the whole of the kindness, and the whole of the realm. The Goose won for good, the year it didn't come — won by becoming, at last and openly, the principle it had always secretly been. The old man's grandfather still beat it once, in a year no one can fix. The prints grow fiercer. The children grow up racing themselves. And somewhere in Mr Pottle's coop a perfectly ordinary bad-tempered goose stands in for the impossible, and knows nothing of it, and bites the hand that feeds it; and Mr Pottle says "good Goose," and means it.