The Goose
My dog (the one at my parents') was getting out of the property and going to the neighbor's yard to steal goose eggs. In one of those, my sister picked up from her one of these eggs and after checking it for a while against the light (these things are HUGE! Like 2 tennis balls put together) she noticed a little dark circle inside. She browsed the net and researched on the development cycle of the geese and decided to give a try at hatching the egg. This was about 5 weeks ago.
Yesterday morning she gave my mom and I a call and said that the egg was cracking and that something that looked like a little foot was beginning to stick out. We were pretty excited but she said that it was early. Apparently a goose egg needs 6 weeks to hatch... So we thought that perhaps the mother goose had been hatching the egg for 1 or 2 weeks before our dog stole it. Well we were all happy and my sis went out to buy some chicken food (goose, chicken... What's the difference right?) and said she'd be close by just in case the thingy needed help getting out.
Later at night, around 8 pm, she gave me a call because she couldn't find mom. I noticed a little accent in her tone. She said that while she was doing stuff around the house she heard a crack in the kitchen. She ran inside because she thought it was about time and the goose was trying to get out, but she was met by this ugly, rotten smell! She checked the egg and noticed a long crack and something whitish coming out from it. She wasn't sure if that was normal or not... Babies come out all dirty so... maybe birds do too. Well, since it was already cracked she tried to open it up a bit and more liquid (this time grayish yellow) came out. She said it smelled really bad and that she saw a little red something in it. After fully opening the egg she could see the goose, but it just wasn't complete. She seemed sad and asked if perhaps she should have left it crack alone. That maybe she had killed it when she opened it... :(
I told her not to worry. That her baby had probably died a while back. It is like those dogs one finds along the road after a couple of days of being hit - they get bloated with gases. So probably the goose had died a while back and the shell could no longer contain the fumes that had formed in there. She ended up agreeing with me, but still was sad about it since she had spent so much time taking care of it. She bought the lamp; measured the temperature; turned it as the notes online said; even had a calendar of what the goose was supposed to look like each day... I wonder what went wrong.
*sigh* She was so excited about it... but it just wasn't meant to be.
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