The Goose Is On the Loose Chp. 2: Sweet Apple Acres (incomplete) (Patreon)

The elderly pony appeared to be asleep, and the pie was right there. The goose waddled up to the little table and grasped the pie in its beak.

Ouch! That was hot. The goose dropped the pie back on the table, waking up the elderly pony. “What in— a goose!” She got to her hooves. “Shoo! Shoo, goose!”

The goose did not shoo… not until the elderly pony picked up the walker that was on the other side of the chair and waved it threateningly at the goose. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, the goose honked in indignation, fluffed its wings, and strutted off toward the barn.

Up on top of the barn, the big red stallion was banging away at the roof with his hammer. The goose strolled into the barn, where its beady eyes were drawn to a stool… a stool that had on top of it a plate, and on that plate, a sandwich. The goose came closer. Yes! That was a daisy sandwich. Two items for its picnic!

It tried to pick up the plate with its beak, reasoning that if it carried the sandwich on the plate, it would be able to transport both at the same time. However, as soon as it picked up the plate, the sandwich slid off into the hay on the floor. Well. That was regrettable. Maybe it should go back for the basket so it could put the sandwich in the basket… but that basket had been pretty large, and probably hard to drag.

First things first. With the plate in its beak, it waddled quickly, flap-pap-pap, out the door, alongside the house — which went behind the elderly pony, so she didn’t see the goose — and over to the gate that led to the orchard, back the way it had come. As it walked, it looked around, noting the positions of everything. There was a gate back out of the property, leading to the road… that seemed like a great avenue to explore, later, when it was time to leave this area. It saw a chicken coop and a couple of hog houses, but no cow barn… yet. Well, the to-do list had said to ride a cow, so there had to be a cow around here somewhere.

It would take too long to actually take the plate all the way to the picnic blanket, so it just stuck it under a bush right outside the gate, where the ponies wouldn’t see it, and then went back to the barn for the sandwich. The pie was probably not cool enough for beak-carry yet.

Carefully it observed the positions of everything. The doors to the house proper appeared to be shut, with handles that the goose had to wonder why ponies would have handles like that, and why they could use round handles when the goose couldn’t. The goose preferred levers that could be pried up or down with a beak, but you couldn’t have everything. The barn, however, had two large, heavy doors, one of which was closed. The other was propped open by a rope tied around the handle at one end and around a stake in the ground at the other end. A large nail sticking out of the stake provided the leverage to keep the rope from sliding up and off the stake.

That wasn’t a very complicated knot. The goose eyed it with interest.

In the rest of the yard, the old mare had her walker on one side of her rocker, and her table with the pie on it on the other, and appeared to be mostly asleep. The goose considered the possibility of dragging the walker off, but decided that the sandwich was more important. There was a well in the front of the yard, near the gate to the outside, with a bucket and a couple of water barrels beside it. Next to that there was a hill, that sloped upward gently and gradually but climbed high enough to look down on the house. The portion of the hill close to the house was planted with rows of vegetables of some kind, but up at the top there were more apple trees, and barrels full of apples sitting on top of that hill. The goose couldn’t count particularly high, so it just noted that there were lots of the barrels.

There were four gates in the yard. One gate, the one the goose had come through, led back to the orchard the goose had traveled through on its way from the Everfree and the yellow mare’s house. The second gate was in the front yard leading out to the road. A third gate was no more than a gap in the fence on the opposite side of the house, near the door that the goose couldn’t open, and barely a few paces away from that there was a fourth gate, another of the rounded arches, leading up to the hill with the vegetables and the additional orchard at the top. The third and fourth gates were set in a small set-aside of fencing that contained the door the goose couldn’t open, and some lovely flowers in flowerboxes that might just be within the reach of a gooseneck.

But first things first. Get that sandwich before the stallion climbed off the roof and found it.

The goose put its head down and ran, full tilt, toward the barn door, slipping inside before anypony saw it. So far so good. The sandwich had not been cut in half, which was even better; that meant the goose was going to be able to carry the entire sandwich. And whatever ingredients it was using were doing a good job of keeping it practically glued together. The goose smelled peanuts as it lifted the sandwich, and apples, and carrots, and celery. Yum. Most of what it was assembling for the picnic were things it didn’t particularly care about, it just needed them because of the to-do list, but this sandwich? This sandwich was going in a goose belly, later on.

It strutted out the door with the sandwich. This turned out to be a mistake.

“Hey! Hey, there! That’s my sandwich!” a stallion’s voice yelled from above. 

The goose began running for the gate back to the orchard, figuring that the stallion would have to take time to climb off the roof. It had forgotten entirely about the fantastic resilience of earth ponies. The stallion jumped from the upper roof onto the small, awning-like roof over the door the goose couldn’t open, and from there, was easily able to leap to the ground and give chase.

“Give that back!” the stallion yelled.

Recognizing that for speed, it was no match for a pony, the goose dropped its sandwich and stalked off in high dudgeon. The stallion picked up the sandwich. “This still worth eatin’?” he asked himself, sniffed it, and replied “Eeyup.” Then he used his mouth to carry it back to the barn.

The goose saw its opportunity for revenge. It tailed the pony as he trotted toward the barn, then quickly undid the rope around the stake as soon as the pony was in. The door slammed shut. There was a latching bolt on the other door, at a height a filly could reach it, just barely within goose reach. The goose flapped its wings rapidly and jumped, getting just enough lift that it was able to grab the latch handle with its beak. It then scrabbled sideways, using feet braced against the door and wings banking to the side, to get the latch to slide closed across the other door.

“What in— Hey! That goose locked me in!” The stallion banged on the door. “Let me out!”

This woke the elderly mare. “What in tarnation?” She got to her hooves, slowly, while the goose edged along the side of the building. “What’s all this dadburned racket?”

“Granny, that goose locked me in the barn,” the stallion’s voice came through the door, muffled. “Can you get the door back open?”

“Land sakes, why don’t you just go through the house?”

“My hooves are covered in mud.”

“So wipe ‘em off on the hay!”

“Granny, can you just get the door unlocked? I don’t wanna bang on it, I might break it.”

While the goose could hear this conversation behind it, that was not where its focus was. The pie was unguarded. And, it turned out, cool enough for a beak to carry it.

Success! It lowered its neck and ran as fast as it could go to the orchard.

<strike>Lock the stallion in the barn</strike>