I never planned on being a goose daddy. I spent eight months in prison with no idea if I was ever going to see the outside world again, let alone what I might do if I was ever released. I didn’t have a home to go to. Three weeks after my arrest, my wife Kelly had started to turn her back on me, the weight of the evidence against me and the pressure of the public opinion simply too much for her to withstand. I didn’t make any plans for life after the accusation. I was taken to prison and I tried to survive each day there without going completely insane or getting myself killed. Then, without warning, three months into the trial proceedings, with my lawyer looking more strained and exhausted with every passing day, the Office of Public Prosecutions dropped the charges against me. The legal procedure, a motion of “no billing,” meant that I was not technically acquitted. I was not guilty—but I was not innocent either. There simply wasn’t enough evidence to ensure I would be convicted, so they decided to let me go until new evidence could be acquired, if any ever surfaced. With the knowledge that I could be re-charged at any time, I was sent out into a hateful city. I went home, packed my things and fled north on nothing more than the instinct to hide and terror of the public’s revenge. Kelly wasn’t at home when I left. She refused to see me. I had to borrow a car from my lawyer.

Not long after I’d arrived in Crimson Lake and rented this small, beat-up house, a mother goose with a broken wing had showed up and interrupted my sunset drinking, squawking and flapping on the other side of the wire—the croc side. It was the first time in more than a year that I’d laid eyes on a creature more helpless than myself. The three-foot-tall, snow-white Anser domesticus, which I named Woman, had six fluffy chicks trailing behind her, just begging something slippery and primordial to emerge from the dark waters of the lake and snap her up. Since then, Woman the goose and her babies and me had lived together on the edge of the water and tried to heal.

Her babies had grown up quickly, and these were the creatures that surrounded me now as I assembled their new living quarters, approaching at times, examining my bare feet in the lush grass or pecking at my pockets where I sometimes kept grain pellets. Watching, their beady eyes following my hands as I pushed the screws into the corrugated iron roof of the playhouse.