Best Summer Stories

By Black Inc. Books

Brilliant short fiction from some of Australia’s most talented storytellers

A woman suspects her partner of murder. A father seeks to save his son from a looming disaster. A boy finds love in the heat of summer as a dust storm transforms his city and his fortunes. A guard in a detention centre causes tragedy. A town is consumed by a strange apocalypse that its residents struggle to keep contained.

Continuing Black Inc.’s long tradition of discovering and celebrating the country’s finest writers, these exceptional stories will entertain, move and provoke you long after you finish reading. Spend this summer with Australia’s best writers.

Michael Mohammed Ahmad • Liz Allan • Romy Ash • Tony Birch • Stephanie Bishop • Mikaella Clements • Aoife Clifford • Lauren Aimee Curtis • Demet Divaroren • Elizabeth Flux • John Kinsella • Jack Latimore • Jennifer Mills • Paddy O'Reilly • Fikret Pajalic • Elliot Perlman • Allee Richards • Mirandi Riwoe • Beejay Silcox • Elizabeth Tan • Tien Tran • Brenda Walker • Ben Walter • Marlee Jane Ward • Katy Warner • Chris Womersley • Danielle Wood • Michelle Wright

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Oct 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781743820704

Book preview

collection.

UNSPEAKABLE

Paddy O’Reilly

I sit on the damp wooden bench of the bus stop with gusts of rain springing over me. Wind talks to the roadside trees. Rainbow snakes of oil slide along the wet road. Soon dawn will come, and then it will be 6.40, when the timetable says the first bus will arrive. Barnerevool.

The ache in my lower body could be the beginning of my period, or perhaps seeing my dying father has shoved a spear in my gut. Or is it the speed wearing off? Hours ago, I downed a blue cap from the truck driver who wanted me to keep him awake with conversation.

‘Spotting you a lift and a free high,’ he’d said too loudly, like a man used to being ignored. ‘You can’t complain about that.’

‘Not complaining,’ I said, taking the pill and washing it down with the half-bottle of tepid Coke I’d been lugging around for the last five hours. I’d considered refusing this lift. The truck was loaded with sheep whose fear bulged even further out of the slats of the B-double trailer than their shorn woolly bodies. But no-one else had stopped.

‘Open the esky at your feet,’ he said. ‘Pass me a beer. Take one for yourself if you want.’

His face shone yellow in the headlights bouncing off the pale trunks of roadside trees, aroma of sweat and man cheese, rim of his belly steering the truck and one hand drooping over the top of the wheel. I snapped open the ring-pull and passed him the tinnie.

‘So, tell me about yourself.’

I’d been visiting my half-sister, ‘old skanky whore’ I called her.

‘You shouldn’t say that about your sister,’ he said, as if she was some friend of his.

‘It’s a joke. She’s thirty-five, married with two kids and lives in the suburbs. She’s the opposite of a skanky whore.’

Whenever I visited her I felt like a crone, even though I was fifteen years younger. The things I’ve had to do, I wanted to tell her, they’re making me old. But I didn’t. I hung out with her kids. Six and four. We played Go Fish and I pushed them on the swings at the park, hearing myself warning the six-year-old not to go too high. Hang on tight! I’d call out although I felt as if I was the body in danger of letting go at the top of the arc, flipping off into the air like some trapeze artist.

We walked back to my half-sister’s house holding hands. I knew she’d be waiting all erect and bright-eyed at the breakfast bar, clenching her jaw and praying I hadn’t done anything stupid. She never said a word but I knew. She only remembered me as the fourteen-year-old she left behind in Melbourne. I would always be that girl to her: shorn hair, aggro clothes, a skinny tornado churning through the world with a mean sense of humour and a reckless temper.

‘Her husband’s an arsehole,’ I told the truck driver.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Just is.’ I knew he wanted an example of why her husband was an arsehole, but the question could be read two ways: what acts classified him as an arsehole or what had caused him to become an arsehole. My analytical thinking was improving with the language study – it didn’t mean I had to answer everything.

We were coming into a town, speed signs and a few houses visible. The driver eased down the gears and engaged the air brakes, which sounded like the opening of a thousand beer cans. Jissss.

‘So what else did you do there?’ He passed me his empty and I cracked another for him but he slipped it into the cradle beside his seat. ‘After we get through the town,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose.

‘I saw a movie I’d been hanging out for. Aliens land on earth, but they’re not dangerous. People try to communicate with them. Then they find out the alien language means they can know the future.’

‘Good movie?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s it? Yeah?’

‘Yep.’ They could have made that movie for me alone. I’d had feelings there were no words for, feelings about the future that needed new words, or smoke or clouds for words.

I looked closely at the truckie’s face for the first time since I’d climbed into the cabin.

‘What happened to you?’ I asked, pointing at his ear and its puckered red seam instead of a lobe.

‘Wife – ex-wife – come at me with a knife. Cuts half my ear off and then she starts crying and apologising and she drives me to Emergency. Some kid doctor hashed the job, couldn’t sew it back on.’

‘She must have been pissed off.’

‘All women are pissed off. Youse all need to calm the fuck down.’

‘I’m calm,’ I said, the speed crawling around in my blood like a horde of crazy ants. My body was fluttering but my head was fine. I’d felt calm the minute I left the town. I sat on the bus that was heading out to the highway where I’d start hitching, and I let myself slide around the way kids do on the slippery vinyl seats as the school bus swerves and brakes its way through the traffic. It was only me and the driver by the end of the route. He looked at me in the rear-vision mirror and saw me flopping around all ragdolly and he asked if I knew where I was going. Home, James, I told him, and don’t spare the horses.

‘So a good thing happened,’ I told the truck driver.

‘Yeah?’

It was after the hospital visit. My half-sister Heather and I had waited by Dad’s bed for him to wake up. I wasn’t sure why I’d come. We stood there for ten minutes, then I collected a couple of chairs from other people’s beds and we sat beside the window for another twenty minutes, saying nothing. The hospital noises squeaked and groaned around us and people talked in desperate cheery notes like birds in cages. I don’t know what Heather was thinking, but I was looking out over the tops of houses and imagining one of them was mine. I thought I’d like the two-storey with the blue walls and a wide canopy stretched out from the house ready to sail into the bay. At home Mum and I lived in a flat stacked on top of two floors of flats and crushed under the weight of another flat that had so many people coming and going it might as well have been a train station. We called it New Delhi Central, although someone told us later they were Pakistani, not Indian, but once we’d set in our minds that we lived under New Delhi Central we couldn’t shake it. Language works that way – you learn a bad habit and it’s with you for life. New Delhi’s busy tonight, Mum would mumble. All aboard.

Heather and I bored ourselves into a visitor coma while Dad lay flat and silent as a corpse, until Heather jerked and snorted like someone who’s snapped awake. She stood up and pulled the sheet off Dad’s body. His hospital gown was rucked up at his waist and he was shrivelled everywhere, scrofulous white skin and mean little flaps and wrinkles over marrowless bone.

‘Not much left of him,’ she said. She tossed the sheet back. The stiff clean cotton settled into the creases of a riverbed or the sand after the tide’s gone.

‘I thought he might have an ankle monitor.’

‘He’s hardly going to get up and run away.’

Once we were on the street she asked if I was glad he was dying.

‘Pretty much,’ I said. ‘Di monn brenrool.’

‘Huh?’

‘Nothing. I’m glad, I guess.’ How to explain a rusty old grief for something I had never known?

She nodded. ‘Well, you didn’t have to come but you did so good on you. You’re going home tonight?’

When I’d told her I was coming she offered to pay my fare but I’d lied that I had a train ticket.

‘How’s your mum anyhow?’ she asked.

‘She’s a four-worder now. Can’t string much more than that together. She’s okay. Neighbour’s looking out for her but I should get back.’

‘We could take a walk before you catch your train,’ she said. ‘It’s a beautiful day. I can’t stay long, have to pick up the kids, but I can take you somewhere nice near the station.’

‘Sure.’

The place she took me, I told the truck driver, was a botanical garden.

‘The wife likes gardening,’ he said. ‘Tries to grow tomatoes every year but she reckons the soil’s no good. They never set fruit.’

‘The one who cut off your ear?’

‘Nah. The new one.’

We were through the little town by then, passing the last of the outbuildings. The CFA was the biggest shed we’d seen. Its big red roller door lit up with a sensor light as a ute pulled up outside. I wondered what someone would be doing there so late. After the final town sign, the driver accelerated to highway speed, the truck shaking as the revs increased, all the horsepower trembling to be let loose. A four-wheel drive pulled onto the verge so we could overtake.

‘Could be a fire,’ the truck driver said as if he’d been thinking what I’d been thinking. ‘No forest around here. Maybe a house fire or a grass fire.’

‘We had a fire once in our block of flats,’ I told him.

It had started in a flat four doors down from us on the same floor. A couple lived there with their plasticky baby that was always shiny and swollen and crying. Mum said it had a disease and wouldn’t live long, but after the fire they came back and the baby grew bigger and shinier and started to stagger up and down the landing in a fat stinky nappy and singlet, one of the parents following behind and hoiking it up when it stumbled into a dead pot plant or a chair outside someone’s door. It was still alive at two years old but it hadn’t spoken yet and no-one could work out if it was a boy or a girl. The parents called it Baby, which didn’t help. Maybe they thought giving it a proper name would tempt fate.

On the morning of the fire the firies took a long time to come, probably because false alarms went off every week in our block. All the flats were fitted with smoke detectors that went ballistic if you grilled a chop. This time actual flames were shooting out of the window. We tenants who were home gathered in a raggedy bunch on the landing far enough away that we wouldn’t get hurt. We wore pyjamas and trackies and one lady had a cup of tea and another bloke offered beers around, even though it was seven a.m. A few took it as their opportunity to puff a quick ciggie, since we’re not supposed to smoke on the estate except in designated smoking areas. I suppose they thought the extra smoke wouldn’t be noticed. No-one was worried about the parents and the baby. The word had gone around that they both cleaned early shift at the hospital and dropped the baby off at the grandparents every morning at six. Then someone shouted at us to shut up, and we did, and we heard screams inside the flat. Still no fire truck, although we could hear the siren singing its way towards us down Abersteen Road.

First thing I thought was, who’s going to be the hero? I guess we all wondered that because people started to shift and turn and look at each other. A few screen doors thwacked as more residents came outside to join the crowd. You could hear the fire now, tearing and cracking, ripping through the material of the flat.

‘Jesus, did anyone help them?’ the truck driver asked.

The man who lived next door to the flat with the fire suddenly belted down the landing, thongs clapping and wings of his dressing-gown flying. People cheered, thinking he was running to help, but he disappeared inside his own flat and ponied back a few minutes later loaded up with bags and a laptop. We couldn’t even look at him. Meantime, the old Armenian lady from 307 had edged down and was calling out and jabbing her face towards the window, trying to see then pulling back from the heat.

‘You didn’t do anything?’ the truck driver said. He made it sound as if I was a cheat to tell him this story where I was a hopeless bystander.

‘I did!’ I said. He’d ruined it now. I’d been trying to tell the story properly, like a book where you don’t find out till the end what really happened. ‘You know why? Because the Armenian lady caught fire!’ Now I’d ruined it. Had to make myself the hero and I couldn’t stop. ‘A burning ember flew out of the window and caught on her nightie. She must have been in shock because a dirty yellow flame curled up her front but she didn’t even move.’

‘So you raced down and put it out,’ the truck driver said.

‘I did.’

‘Good on you.’ He patted my thigh. I pushed his stubby hand away.

Second time someone had said that to me in a single day. They were probably right to congratulate me for the smallest thing. From my hopeless bystander life they picked the one shiny sharp shard of courage and said, Good on you!

‘Anyway, the botanical garden,’ I said to him, moving along before I fell for the Good on yous and forgot my story.

‘Yeah, but what happened to the people in the flat?’

‘Oh, it was some metal ornament that made a noise from the heat escaping through its holes. Not people. They were well gone.’ We had thought we recognised human voices but we were wrong.

‘Phew,’ he said, but again, clearly disappointed.

‘So this botanical garden had a maze. My sister and me got lost in it for half an hour.’ Even as the words formed in my mouth – sibilant, bilabial, alveolar – I realised I should have said ‘My sister and I’. ‘I could hear her voice calling, This way, over here, but I couldn’t find her. We just about smacked into each other at the exit, coming out of different paths. And when we stepped through, it was like another world. Rolling lawn and a lake and weeping willows.’

‘I’ve gotta be honest, love. Not that interested in gardens. Can you drum up some other conversation?’

I’d wanted to tell him the story of what happened next in the garden with the old derro and the two picnic ladies but he’d pissed me off, and I thought it might be better to keep that story for myself anyway. It could be a special thing only I knew, a story that might even make me cry once I’d got over the surprise of it. Stories can seem miserable and then surprise you at the end because they’re not miserable really; it’s the ideas about those people you already had fixed in your mind poisoning the way you see things. Like looking at an old bloke with stains on his pants, a bottle of sherry clutched to his heart, lying on his swag in a fancy garden, and making that judgement: What a derro. But I would probably tell Mum the story, because that’s what she loved most of all now, stories from the world. I was getting better at how to tell them too, if only people like this driver wouldn’t interrupt.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I could tell you about this thing I saw on the internet. It was unbelievable.’

‘Nah, I see enough shit on the internet. Tell me something real. What about you? You got a boyfriend?’

I used one shoe to nudge the other off my foot, then hooked off the second with my toes. The runners were old and loose and slipped off without resistance. In the dim cabin, my white feet were like fish. I wiggled my fishy toes, rubbed my soles against the gritty mat, pressed them into the floor thudding with engine power. It felt good.

‘No boyfriend. Had one once but he didn’t like me enough.’

‘Was he bad to you?’

‘No, not that. Hard to explain.’ Di vebelnarnlort. Regret, blame, sorrow, longing, self-doubt.

‘Didn’t give you flowers? Didn’t say I love you enough? That’s what my wives complain about.’

‘So why don’t you bring them flowers and tell them you love them?’

He laughed. ‘There’d be something else. Women, never fucking satisfied.’

‘I am a woman, you know.’

‘You mean I should give you flowers?’

‘Ha ha. I mean you should stop complaining about women in front of me.’

‘Then I’d have nothing to talk about.’ He laughed again, wheezy as if the air had a hard time getting up out of that belly.

When he reached over and switched on the AM radio I was glad. I was tired of talking – the words all seemed so bland. The whole day had been hard and the unexpected stuff had sloshed me around in an emotional washing machine. I couldn’t explain how I felt. And there was a pulling in my gut, not hurting yet, but enough for me to have slipped in a tampon before I started hitching. I hated that sensation – persistent but not painful, a small nagging threat of pain to come.

The radio news finished with reports of a massacre in Europe. They were killing each other even though they had lived next door all their lives and even spoke the same language. The truck driver flipped through the stations until he came to a talkback channel. As the late-night caller’s voice ninnied out of the speakers, the driver yawned like a hippo.

‘Fucking whiners,’ he said once his jaw had rehinged itself. ‘Don’t like this, can’t do that, they shouldn’t be doing blah, blah, blah. Like bloody sheep – one person complains then ten others’ll ring up about the same thing.’

That reminded me of the cargo on the truck. ‘Those sheep in the back, are they going to the abbattoir?’ I couldn’t hear the sheep over the engine, but I imagined they were bleating out cries for help. I tried not to see that image of them bulging out of the truck as if someone had stuffed them in there the way you stuff a chicken, pushing with your knuckles and fingertips until no more can fit. A woolly leg of one sheep was sticking out through the slats at an angle that wasn’t right.

‘Don’t tell me you’re a bloody vegetarian.’

‘No.’

‘Good. They’re not going to slaughter anyway. I’m delivering them to a buyer.’

‘I think one of them has a broken leg.’

‘That’d be right. Fucking idiots at the saleyard didn’t have a clue. Looked like they’d never handled an animal in their lives.’

We passed a petrol station and restaurant lit up green and yellow at the top of a hill. Over the crest the tyres chewed along a newly tarmacked surface into a valley of pine plantation, murky darkness shying away from the headlights. I wound down the window when we hit the smooth road again. The night wind pushed in noisily, flattening my cheeks. When I wound up the window, the muddy vibration of the engine resumed its hum in the cabin.

‘So what do you do? You working?’

‘I look after my mum, and I’m studying.’

‘Sick, is she?’

‘Brain damage. Head injury.’ Di sporan monn.

‘That’s tough. And what do you study? You at uni?’

‘I’m studying linguistics with some people on the internet. Languages, how they’re made.’

‘Is that right. We truck drivers have our own language. See that vehicle coming up the opposite lane? Shopping trolley.’

The little hatchback whizzed past below us. I liked sitting up this high in the truck cabin. Mistress of all I surveyed, the unforgiving queen of the road.

‘Guess what a disco whistle is.’

I shook my head.

‘Police siren. It’s a whole other world, our world.’

He was talking about words. My language was a brand-new language. I’d got my head around the sounds, the fricatives and glottal stops, the way the tongue tapped and narrowed in the mouth. I’d gone for five vowels and fifteen consonants. I didn’t like the split words like in Na’vi or the slow, angry but hesitant way they spoke Klingon on Star Trek. My language would be designed with tight neat mouth shapes to sound fast and snappy. I had created words for emotions and objects and abstract concepts, not enough, but a start. I had a small vocabulary of verbs that needed work. For the next phase, I was studying the grammar of different languages so I could develop my own.

‘I’m inventing a language that has words for things English can’t describe. There’s a group of us in a forum, talking about languages and making new ones. We call ourselves conlangers. Constructed language makers.’

‘Well, look at you, smarty. Say something in it.’

‘People always ask that.’

‘Well, go on.’

‘Di Kat spomenn.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I am Kat. The name, not the animal.’

‘Okay, Kat, so what’s a word for – what did you call it – something English doesn’t have?’

‘Skueelint. It’s the twinge you get in your belly that means your period might be coming.’ I’d invented that word on the spot but he didn’t need to know.

‘Jeez, too much information, love.’

‘Brawt. The feeling of regret you have when you arrive at Bunnings but the sausage tent has closed.’

‘Really?’

‘No, I’m kidding. Although it’s an okay word. Maybe I’ll use it for something else.’

‘The feeling you get when your wife cuts off your ear?’

‘Not a lot of use for that word.’

He expelled another laugh, that wheezy gut laugh that needed a word of its own. Fat man laugh. No vocalisation, just air squeezed through compressed flesh.

‘You got a word for needing to take a shit? ’Cause we’re going to stop at the next roadhouse.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

From the outside the roadhouse seemed hospitably bright and clean – walls of white window beaming into the night, two cars and two trucks lined up in the car park at the back, a tempting whiff of fried onions from the kitchen vents. Inside, the tables and chairs were shabby, the counter pocked with coin dents, and the stainless steel behind the fryers dark with grease. A tired woman in a pink uniform and cap took my order for two hamburgers with the lot and two soft drinks. I paid with the truckie’s twenty-dollar notes. He had retired to the toilet, told me he could be a while. ‘All the sitting binds you up. Hurts like buggery, excuse the pun,’ he’d said. I’d told him that was too much information.

I picked a spot near the window. The other truckie, in shorts and open shirt over t-shirt, was sawing at a steak. A couple sat picking chips one by one out of a single cardboard cone in the middle of the table, and a mum and dad with two children in pyjamas sat in silence at their table against the far wall. Everyone seemed lonely.

By the time the truckie emerged from the toilet his hamburger was cold and his drink was warm. He ate the hamburger anyway, said a few words to the other truckie on the way out. Maybe in their special language. The sheep were quiet. I was afraid they were dead but he told me they always settled in the night, or maybe they were paralysed with adrenaline overload. He said we wouldn’t hear another peep out of them until they were unloaded.

We climbed back into the truck and negotiated our way out through a complicated lane system that sent us in two circles until finally he drove the wrong way down a one-way lane and bumped over a kerb onto the road. As I bounced on the seat my teeth cracked together.

‘Ow!’

‘Sorry, love.’

I wondered how the sheep were faring.

I slept a little, and later we talked about footy and food. Eighty clicks out of the city, we slowed and pulled into a truck parking bay beside the road. The truckie told me he was turning off the highway to drop his load at a local property. There was a bus stop further along the highway that would take me to the train.

‘Take the train, all right, love? Don’t hitch. Don’t be stupid. You could be raped or killed. You’re lucky you got me this time.’

‘Okay.’

‘I mean it.’ He tried to pass me another twenty-dollar note but I reminded him I had the change from the roadhouse stop.

‘Do you have a daughter?’ I asked as I climbed backwards out of the cabin. ‘Is that why you picked me up?’

‘Sort of. That’s another story.’

You need words of the right shape to tell a story. Nayani on the conlang forum says that the first thing you need to decide is your goal for creating a language.

Dim petter blamas moos. Dim petter adim metter kuorais. Dim metter fellut us prout

Reviews for Best Summer Stories

[aya8herron · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a researcher for the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, author Michael Quetting had the opportunity to be involved in an amazing experiment. His mission: to raise geese from hatchlings, teach them to fly, and gather flight data. For eleven months, Quetting took his charges for daily swims and made sure they were well taken care of. Along the way, he learned that each had its own personality from feisty to cuddly. Just like raising human children, the author discovered there were ups and downs to parenting seven little ones. Check out this book and join the adventure of a lifetime. The Bottom Line: The dedication the author had to see this experiment through was amazing. Filled with humor and packed with information, this is a very quick read that will interest nature lovers and students of biology.

[finchamfamily · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Papa Goose by Michael Quetting is a book about the human condition made visible through the lens of nature and the raising of seven geese. This book is full of its ups and downs as the lives of the geese family changes, including Michael. Who knew the daily lives of a geese family could be so varied and interesting. It is rare to find a book that touches on human psychology and ornithology as well as Papa Goose does, and what an amazing combination it is. This is a very easy read and should be read by as many as possible as the messages in this book would do the world a lot of good. While some of the messages do come off as blatant and the discussions and musings of the geese, as told from Michael’s brain not actual talking, can be silly and overly anthropomorphic this book is still worth a read. All and all Papa Goose is an excellent book and would be perfect for just about anyone, especially young adults who could benefit from seeing things from a different perspective.

[drsyko_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Michael Quetting is a scientist working at the Max Planck Institute Win Germany. He wants to study various aspects of how geese fly and how various factors affect their flight. So, what better way to do that than to raise a bunch of goslings from birth and then fly with them? This book is the story of how Quetting raised the geese as their "Papa Goose" and all of the joys and frustrations that ensued from such an endeavor. This is an endearing, as well as fascinating, tale of human and animal interaction and how deeply this interaction can affect both. While at times the writing lacks detail and some of the descriptions are a bit bland, overall I was engrossed by this book and was moved by what happened to both the writer and the geese. I recommend this book for both older children and adults.

[9cee9 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love books about animals raised by sensitive individuals who observe behaviors of other species - particularly birds. While Quetting only "parents" seven goslings for about a year, it's an immersive and amazing adventure. Heartwarming prose and fascinating stories make his shared experiences a delightful read.

[pondelro · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is a sweet and well-written book about a man given the task of raising seven geese to adulthood. We learn about the geese and all of their individual personalities and that is fascinating. However, what stood out the most was the author's realization that the connection between all creatures (including humans) is something we have lost, but is essential to a good life. Highly recommended.

[sparemethecensor · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Endearing autobiographical story of an ornithologist raising seven goslings as part of a flight data collection experiment. This is a quick and easy read that is also heartwarming and highly educational about geese -- I never knew so much about the geese at my local park.

[aligarf · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very sweet book. I enjoyed the authors description of life with 7 goslings he raised from eggs to their release into the wild. I would have liked more bio on the man himself, what made him attempt this project, other than his knowledge of how to fly a plane... I was not surprised, but enchanted by the personalities exhibited by his 'flock'. Having pet birds in the past, I know how unique they each are, to the surprise of my non bird owning friends. The book was fun, and a nice escape from the world.

[ashmolean1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I loved Wesley The Owl (author of the book and introduction)and hoped I would love this. I guess I am more interested in owls than geese. This was a nice story but I didn't feel the author's connection to the goslings enough to give this 4 stars. However, it will appeal to people who like books about animals and pets.

[taphophile13 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Quetting works at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and is taking part in a project to gather meteorological data and learn more about flight dynamics by attaching data loggers to the backs of greylag geese. The project begins with nine goose eggs in an incubator which Quetting tends, turning the eggs and checking temperature and humidity levels. He also reads aloud to the to the yet to be hatched goslings in hopes that they will imprint on his voice. As seven of the eggs hatch, Quetting names each bird, only some months later learning that he has misgendered several of them. The goslings see him as their parent and follow him in single file over the next few months as he takes them on outings to meadows and ponds. Fortunately geese are pre-programmed with most of the information they will need although Quetting worries about protecting them from predators. It soon becomes obvious that while the birds look identical they have very different personalities. They quickly form alliances among themselves and one of them is a bit of a rebel who doesn’t want to abide by papa’s rules. When the goslings are ready to fly Quetting leads them into the air with his ultralight. The project is a success as the birds make over sixty flights wearing the data loggers.Papa Goose is a quick pleasant read. There are no deep insights although Quetting seems to become more relaxed and perhaps a better father to his human children after his experience as a Father Goose. Black and white photographs of the geese at various ages are included and the last short chapter provides information about some of the birds’ current whereabouts.

[yukon92 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I received a free copy of this book from the LTER give-away in exchange for my honest opinion. This book is an absolute delight to read - I must say that I was already aware of the whole story, because I had seen the documentary about the whole concept on German TV a few years ago. The dedication it took the author (with help from his coworkers) was amazing. Obviously there can only be a partial happy-end with a story involving wild animals, but it is still a great way to learn more about the life and "thinking" of geese!

[whitreidtan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

When I worked at a lake as a lifeguard, one of our duties was to clean up the beach before opening and by far the most common thing we came across to clean up was goose poop. If a flock of geese had been on the beach that morning, the beach was a disgusting slick of green and white goose pellets. We face the same problem in the summer in the yard at the cottage. Goose dung everywhere. Besides the prolific pooping, I've honestly never thought very much about geese and I certainly never considered them as individual creatures with unique personalities or as important subjects in any sort of scientific experiment. If anything, I considered them an annoyance at best and a scourge at worst. But for a year, Michael Quetting, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, considered them his family as he raised seven geese from egg to adulthood, a task chronicled in the memoir Papa Goose.In an effort to find out information about bird (goose) flight mechanics and aerodynamics and real time atmospheric conditions, Michael Quetting fathered seven greylag geese from before their birth, when he talked to them in their incubator to get them used to his voice, to almost a year old. The geese were raised so that they could eventually be fitted with data loggers to provide scientists with this information. Quetting was careful to have the small balls of down imprint on him, becoming their acknowledged parent. He describes all aspects of their lives together from their vulnerable youngest days, their development of individual personalities, their learning to fly, and finally to the days that each of them finally leaves his care for the wider world. The story is one of joy, contemplation, and frustration. Quetting documents the daily life of the goslings, sharing the soft, sleepy whistles they make when tired, the snoozing with their papa goose, the happy swimming, their contented dandelion eating, and more. Being with the birds causes him to slow down in his own life and to look at what is important. Of course the experiment, the reason he is raising these seven little creatures is always in the background, at the very least, but even in raising them towards a goal, he finds immense happiness, like the day all seven geese fly with him for the first time, following him in his ultralight. Quetting doesn't shy away from the difficulties he encounters, from a recalcitrant gander to the constant loads of goose poo but through it all, his heart shines through. He does anthropomorphize the geese occasionally, imagining what they think of him, the horn he uses to call them, and the things he asks of them. The story is quite sweet and simple in the telling and will likely appeal to animal lovers of all kinds.

[hamlet61-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

When I began reading this book, I was expecting an experience similar to the one I had when I read Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk: profound and moving. Alas, that was not the case with Papa Goose. The bond between Michael Quetting and his birds read more like mutual imprinting than true connection. Add to that the fact that I have ethical issues with purposely imprinting animals on humans for our own scientific use. The book is well-written but did not speak to me