Friends, the more I think back on my adventures in scouts, a trend becomes evident. Most stories worth telling manifest themselves from three catalysts: being stupid, bad weather, and encounters with animals. This story is the result of the latter.

It was a Tuesday night, about midnight. That I do remember. It was a nice night at Woodlore. The south Alabama air was heavy and sticky, and the bullfrogs and cicadas were in full effect. My only concern at that moment was how soon I could fall asleep.

Now the Woodlore staff consisted of, at that point, about 15 guys averaging between 14 and 16 years old. We may not have been a major force to be reckoned with, but we knew our stuff, and despite being short staffed, we put on a damn good school. At the top of the chain was myself and two of my good buddies by the names of Waseem and Josh. They went through the program around the same time I did, and we ran everything like a well-oiled machine.

It was on this fateful night, after showers and before our daily late-night grading and card game, that I heard a scream. It was high pitched, lengthy, and came from the quartermaster’s tent at the end of the row. I poked my head out of my tent to see a half-dressed staff member by the name of Tal run by. Tal is a brown-noser and has been unanimously voted most punchable face on staff, but he’s a hard worker and we keep him around if for nothing else, to be the butt of our jokes. I yelled at him to slow down and asked him what was going on. He responded, with the most serious expression possible, that there was a fox in the quartermaster’s tent.

Now, this was surprising, but Tal is notorious for overreacting and running with the worst case scenario, so while it was plausible that a fox had wandered into camp, I was taking the news with a grain of salt. I put on some pants and wandered out. Waseem, who was the senior patrol leader at the time, was standing just outside my tent with his signature half-asleep, droopy-eyed expression, chuckling at the chaos unfolding in front of him. More shouts came from the tent in question, some about a fox, and others about a stray possum. Waseem and I wandered over there.

As we approached, it was increasingly clear that there was, in fact, an animal in the tent, and it was about fox-sized. I was straining to get a better look when a staff member named Cole, clad in only his briefs and ropers, came running past us looking behind him occasionally as if the fox was hot on his heels. I looked back towards the back of the tent and out of the shadows, three small figures appeared.

Cole was running away not from a fox, nor a possum, nor a group of either. He was running away from three adolescent geese who had decided to wander the 20 or so feet from the lakefront to our campsite. In his defense, they were moving surprisingly quickly and making quite a bit of a ruckus.

They chased Cole all the way up the aisle made from our row of tents, and under the dining fly where he promptly jumped up on the table. The entire staff congregated around the birds, no one sure of what to do, and after a minute of the staff taking photos with the new fowl, and myself, Josh, and Waseem staring blankly at each other, we decided to call the adults for some advice.

Waseem got on the radio at 12:30 am to call the other side of camp. We understandably got no response initially. We called the other side, this time on the phone – no response. We were struggling to figure out what the next step was when the voice of Mr. Smith, the camp coordinator, broke the radio’s silence. What followed next was probably the strangest radio conversation I’ve heard in my many years at Woodlore.

“What is it, Waseem?”

“We’ve got a situation here, there are three geese in the staff site.”

A long pause followed this line. Waseem looked at Josh and me wide-eyed and confused. Finally, one word crackled through the radio static.

“… geese?”

“Yeah, they came up from the lake, and now we can’t get rid of them.”

“… where are they now?”

“They’re just chillin’ under the dining fly.”

It was at this point that the next few transmissions from Mr. Smith were peppered with chuckles from the other adults, who I’m sure were listening intently to the events unfolding before their ears.

The adults were little help. The best advice that they could give us was to “try to get rid of them,” and “just go to bed,” if we couldn’t. Upon this instruction, Waseem tried to lead them out of the area and back toward the lake. The birds wouldn’t budge. Cole, who had talked himself off the table at this point, was now taken with the feathered intruders, and he and a few other staff members decided to name them. After much deliberation, came upon the names Willard, Wallace, and Wombles.

At around 1:00 in the morning, everything we needed to finish was long since completed, and Waseem sent everyone to bed. The three of us stayed up with the birds for about 15 minutes, but we still didn’t have a plan to get rid of them. I suggested that we simply ignore them and go to bed, and promptly followed my own advice. From then on, so the story goes, it was just Josh, Waseem, and the three birds. They figured out a way to lead them back down to the water, and eventually went to bed.

We didn’t see Willard, Wallace, and Wombles the following day, much to Cole’s dismay. Thursday however, we ate lunch with them. They wandered up around mid-morning, and Josh, Waseem, and I once again herded them back down to the water, but they came back within an hour. At that point, their persistence out-paced ours and we decided to accept our new reality.

They’d sit with us at meals and curl up next to our hammocks. They’d follow us around camp, and came and went as they pleased, and it was kind of nice to have staff pets. Not everyone was as fond of them, though. For unknown reasons, a certain staffer named Noah was not a fan, and coincidentally, many of the other staffers were not fans of Noah.

Because of this, Cole, ever the petty idiot, decided that he would lead our three feathered friends into Noah’s tent. Predictably, they covered the ground in a layer of poop, and Noah was quite rightly furious. With that said, I’ll be damned if it wasn’t funny as hell.

Clean up of the freshly whitened ground was easy, as our tents had no floors to speak of, so we simply raked the soiled leaves out of the tent. Willard, Wallace, and Wombles took to the lake shortly after that and I’m sad to say that we haven’t seen them since.

A year and a half later, the staff still remembers those three geese and every once in a while you can hear a few quacks coming from the lake. In all likelihood, however, those quacks do not belong to Willard, Wallace, and Wombles, and instead, belong to the bullfrogs who are the only creatures who can cut through the insanely loud drone of the cicadas. Willard, Wallace, and Wombles have probably long since left the lake.

-Nickel