This last weekend I went to Eastern Oregon to pick up pinecones with my dad, brother and a crew of five workers. We found an abandoned golf course where there were loads of huge pine trees and subsequently loads of pinecones. We spent two days working, which was basically the same five second action repeated for seven hours each day. Walk a few steps, find a nice pinecone, bend over and pick it up, but it in the bucket and repeat.
We camped out on the golf course and while I was resting my tired legs some of the workers found a few geese on a nearby pond. One of the workers ended up chasing a baby goose until it made the fatal mistake of running into some bushes instead of returning to the lake. It was at this point “Nacho” pounced on it and captured it. He brought it back to our makeshift camp to show off his prize and right as he was about to let it go one of the other workers, the “Burro,” grabbed out his knife and cut the goose’s head right off. Goose blood started squirting out and the birds beak kept opening and closing even though the head was severed from the rest of the birds body! At this same time a local resident was walking by with his dog so Nacho quickly shoved the moving bird body into a plastic bag and hid it under my brothers truck. The dog walker came by and chatted for a minute and then carried on. The workers then started to de-feather and clean the goose and butchered it to make soup with. But they didn’t want to eat it because they didn’t have any salt. So they spent like two hours working on this soup and didn’t eat it. They said they would save it for the morning when my dad (who was driving the first load of pinecones back to the farm and then coming back) could bring them some salt. So my dad showed up that morning with some salt but by then the workers were not too excited about eating the soup. So they put the pot into the back of my brothers truck with our other camping gear and it rode around with us all day as we worked. We came back to Troutdale and none of them wanted anything to do with the soup. So it just sat there in my brothers truck.
Yesterday we ended up feeding part of it to our dog and some of his dog friends who seemed to quite enjoy it. So it didn’t go to waste after all.